Dorothy Eden Read Online Free PDF

hall and towards the basement stairs. That was Jeremy coming in. Cressida had wondered idly if he had been taking a girl out, but if so he had left her very early. She was not interested in Jeremy Winter’s night life, she told herself drowsily. She was only grateful to him for picking her up off the street and carrying her inside. Otherwise she would have run away from Dragon House and never have known about this pretty flat that Arabia was so delighted for her to have. It was unbelievable luck. It would be no hardship to spend most of her spare time with Arabia, who was so fascinating and interesting a person anyway, and to be rewarded with a delightful flat as well was too good to be true.
    Arabia had said that after the last tenant had departed she had redone the rooms in preparation for the arrival of a young girl. The paint was gay and fresh, the chintzes new, the carpets a warm, deep red. The bedroom had been done in yellow because that had been Lucy’s favourite colour. But it had not been a deliberate copy of Lucy’s room on the top floor of the house. Lucy was not to steal all the new Cressida Lucy’s personality.
    Had Cressida felt a faint shiver of apprehension at that remark of Arabia’s? Of course she had not. She was herself, and not even required to play a part.
    Nevertheless, as she lay in the dark, she kept thinking about that room at the top of the house, in its petrified state of awaiting the return of its owner from a ball.
    She fell asleep thinking of it, and when she awoke it was still in her mind, compellingly. The turned-down bed, the little feathery slippers set demurely on the floor, the strewn and discarded jewellery on the dressing-table—nothing valuable: a young girl’s seed pearls, a clip shaped like a bird, a comb studded with brilliants.
    Arabia had taken her up there and had said she was to go up at any time she liked. No one else ever went there. Cressida could use Lucy’s little walnut writing-table if she liked. Anything in that room was for her use.
    There was nothing morbid about it, Arabia said. It was a sweet and happy room that made Lucy still alive. “She’s just terribly late coming home,” she said.
    Arabia, standing there in her long formal dinner gown, the incongruous tiara perched rakishly on her white hair, was, indeed, a stranger figure than any charming little ghost coming home late from a ball. Cressida had known then that she had to write it. It might not have any great depth or drama, but it was so human, so charming, so pitiful. The young girl dancing her way unknowingly to death.
    She wanted to sit in that room alone, to imagine herself into the dead Lucy, and then to write.
    There had been a diary lying on the writing desk. As Cressida awoke in the middle of the night she was suddenly seeing that diary, tantalisingly unread. What was in it? No secrets, or it would not be there so innocently. But perhaps one would be able to read between the lines. Being Arabia’s daughter, Lucy could not lack colour.
    Cressida sat up in bed. The excitement, mounting tumultuously within her, would not let her sleep again. All at once she knew that she must go up to Lucy’s room now, in the middle of the night, and learn her secrets.
    As Tom constantly deplored, Cressida always acted on impulse. After all, it was impulse (and Tom’s unendurable stubbornness) that had brought her to Dragon House and this rich untapped stream of material. She had the urge to explore that room upstairs at once, so she would do so.
    Putting on her dressing-gown and slippers she set cautiously forth.
    The marble steps that led to the front door of Dragon House continued in a broad imposing staircase to the first floor, where Arabia strewed her possessions in profusion through the large rooms overlooking the street, and the little dumb woman, Mrs. Stanhope, and her son Dawson, occupied the two smaller rooms at the back.
    The top floor, which was semi-attic, had all been Lucy’s. Two of the rooms