"More than that, it wouldn't surprise me," continued my mistress, still in her impressive tone, "if I'm not far off guessing who took the Rattenheimer ruby that me and Smith's in this fix about!"
"Ah, go on!" said Miss Vi Vassity, striking a match for her cigarette against the minnow-shaped sole of her gilt boot. "Are you goin' to go and believe that my pal Jim sneaked that and then saw you and her in trouble for it? Do you believe that, Smithie?"
"I don't," I said, without hesitation.
Miss Million said defiantly: "Think it over! Think it over! He was always in and out of the hotel, was that Mr. Burke. He was hobnobbing with the Rattenheimers and one and another all day long.
"And he wanted the money. We've proof of that! And he's none too particular about how he gets it! Why, you yourself, Vi. You know he owes you pounds and pounds and pounds at this minute that he's 'borrowed,' and goodness knows how he intends to pay you back!
"You know he's got the cheek of the Old Gentleman himself! And," concluded my young mistress, with a look of shrewdness on her face that I imagine must have been inherited from the late Mr. Samuel Million, "if he isn't the one who stole the ruby, who is?"
A violent ring at the hall-door bell made the finish to this peroration.
I opened the door to a small, freckle-faced telegraph boy.
"For Miss Smith," he said in the pretty, up-and-down Welsh accent that is such a rest after Cockney. I took the wire. I wondered if it was Aunt Anastasia again.
It wasn't.