'How charming,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne with a sigh of satisfaction, sinking into a chair and smelling the roses. 'Your maid seems to be one of those rare treasures who like doing extra things for their mistresses.'
Well, Gertrud is a rare treasure, and it did look clean and dainty next to the beer-stained tables at which coffee was being drunk and spilt by tourists who had left their Gertruds at home. Then the place was so wonderful, the white cliffs cutting out sheer and sharp into the sea, their huge folds filled with every sort of greenery—masses of shrubby trees, masses of ferns, masses of wild-flowers. Down at the bottom there was a steamer anchored, the one by which the Harvey-Brownes were going back later to Binz, quite a big, two-funnelled steamer, and it looked from where we were like a tiny white toy.
'I fear the gracious one will not enjoy sleeping here,' whispered Gertrud as she put a pot of milk on the table. 'I made inquiries on arrival, and the hotel is entirely full, and only one small bedroom in a pavilion, detached, among trees, can be placed at the gracious one's disposal.'
'And my cousin?'
'The room has two beds, and the cousin of the gracious one is sitting on one of them. We have been here already an hour. August is installed. The horses are well accommodated here. I have an attic of sufficient comfort. Only the ladies will suffer.'
'I will go to my cousin. Show me, I pray thee, the way.'
Excusing myself to Mrs. Harvey-Browne I followed Gertrud. At the back of the restaurant there is an open space where a great many feather-beds in red covers were being aired on the grass, while fowls and the waiting drivers of the Sassnitz waggonettes wandered about among them. In the middle of this space is a big, bare, yellow house, the only hotel in Stubbenkammer, the only house in fact that I saw at all, and some distance to the left of this in the shade of the forest, one-storied, dank, dark, and mosquito-y, the pavilion.
'Gertrud,' I said, scanning it with a sinking heart, 'never yet did I sleep in a pavilion.'
'I know it, gracious one.'
'With shutterless windows on a level with the elbows of the passers-by.'