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to live in her house for a while, talk to her sometimes, and bring back an illusion of Lucy’s youth and innocence.
    So how could I refuse her? Apart from being terribly sorry for her she is an absolute poppet, and I adore her already. Also, I like being here, and I’m just so excited about going to work for Mr. Mullins, a friend of Arabia’s who has an antique shop. The whole thing sounds extraordinarily like fate, don’t you agree?
    A word about the other people in the house. A funny little woman like an owl who thrust a note “You’re too late!” into my hand as I arrived, isn’t something out of a melodrama. She has the rooms upstairs, and she has some kind of throat trouble that means she can’t speak above a whisper. She carries a pad and pencil with her all the time. When she wrote that message she thought the flat had been let, as someone had come earlier in the day. She lives with her son Dawson who is fifteen, is tall and thin and wears glasses, and isn’t at all attractive. But I never did like precocious-looking children.
    Miss Glory, a sea captain’s daughter, lives in the ballroom and does the cleaning, and the other tenant on the ground floor is a violinist who plays in a night-club orchestra. His name is Vincent Moretti, and he has very light-coloured hair and eyebrows, so that he has almost a naked look. He flirts with Miss Glory, but I don’t think he is really in love with her. She is flat and brown, like a piece of cardboard. But he makes jokes with her and she giggles. Obviously she adores him. His tastes in music is rather macabre, but I expect he gets tired of playing dance music all night. So I will just have to endure elegies and laments during the day.
    That is all, except Jeremy Winter who catches burglars in the basement. He is a commercial artist, and he is very self-assured and not at all my type.
    Arabia has promised to tell me all of Lucy’s story, and this is going to give me the material for the long serious work that I have always wanted to do. It is so sweet and sad. There is this lovely young girl, full of gaiety and charm, going to balls, having lots of admirers, petted and pampered by her mother, wearing exquisite clothes, always laughing, and then suddenly falling sick and dying. Invitations to dances and parties were coming in after she was dead. They dressed her in new ball gown and pinned on a corsage of flowers as if she were really going to a ball. Then Arabia kept her room exactly as it was when she died, with invitation cards and photographs on the dressing-table, her bed turned down, her night gown and slippers put out. Just as if she were going to be back from a party at any moment.
    Arabia says I am to go in this room whenever I feel like it, and look at anything I want to. I am not being morbid. It is just that Lucy’s life runs through this house like a remembered perfume, or a snatch of song.
    My love and a thousand kisses.
    Your Cressida.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    I N THE MIDDLE OF THE night Cressida woke. Already she had slept only from exhaustion. Her excitement was stirring just beneath her consciousness, and the two hours’ sleep that took away the acuteness of her tiredness brought intense awareness of her whereabouts back.
    She lay for a little while listening to the quiet house. The music and the footsteps had ceased. First there had been Vincent Moretti’s violin, as he had practised in his room at the back of the house before leaving for the night club from which he did not return until almost dawn. There had been some giggling in the passage as he stopped to chat to Miss Glory, and then, as if cheered by Mr. Moretti’s passing remarks, a rollicking polka had come from the ballroom. That would be Miss Glory performing on the grand piano.
    When the music stopped there had been the sound of Mimosa’s miaows as he prowled about the staircase. He was an uncommonly vociferous cat.
    Later the front door had banged, and swift, firm footsteps had gone down the