Read Online The Glass Slipper by Mignon G. Eberhart - Free Book Online

course, to the dining room, which was at the back of the long house and had windows overlooking a small back yard which they shared with their neighbor, Guy Cole. It was enclosed by a high brick fence and had sparse grass and shrubs. From the dining room you also overlooked other houses’ back yards, other houses’ stained and dark brick walls, other windows blank and shining.
    There were, including the basement, five stories; the front and the back rooms of each story were naturally the desired rooms because of the light; in any of the other rooms (opening on each floor from a long narrow hall jutting around the stairwell) you needed artificial light even on a sunny day, for there was almost no space between the lateral walls of the house and those of the houses on either side of it. Heavy curtains masked the depressing, close view of other walls and other windows, but also shut out all the light.
    Steven’s music room had been added; squeezed into the back where the hall left off, and projecting outward into the narrow back yard; it was a long room, extremely narrow, lighted by deep bay windows, heavily curtained, and was entered from the hall by a door at right angles to the dining-room door. Here were Steven’s large concert piano, his long writing table; his radio, his Victrola, his cabinets of records and of sheet music.
    Altogether it was not a cheerful house, but it was well and conveniently located and had been kept in extremely good condition ever since it was built. And it had been one of Crystal’s main interests; the house, its decoration and redecoration; the pictures, the rugs, the authentic and carefully chosen objects of art had all been an important pattern in Crystal’s life.
    That day, wandering from one room to another, Rue hated the house.
    And hated more than any of its many rooms her own that had been Crystal’s, where she sat at last and waited. Waited for news, waited for further catastrophe; waited for Andy to telephone, waited for Brule to come home; waited, though she did not know it, for Juliet Garder.
    It was late in the afternoon when Juliet arrived. Coughing a little from the smoke in the laden air, asking for Mrs Hatterick.
    “Miss Juliet Garder,” said Gross at Rue’s bedroom door. “She gave me no card.”
    “I’ll come down,” said Rue and then changed her mind. The house was quiet except for the distant faint tinkle of the piano in Steven’s studio below. It seemed too quiet and too empty and thus too full of a listening quality which only a silent and empty house, cavernous just then with that abnormal twilight, may possess. “Show Miss Garder up here, please,” said Rue. “And order tea. Bring it up when it is ready.”
    He went away. Juliet. Why had she come? But it was obvious: she and Juliet had nursed Crystal: obviously between them they might be able to piece out a portion of the truth. All at once Rue wondered why she had not thought of going to Juliet. If she had not been so curiously paralyzed with waiting she would have done so; would have gone to the hospital to see Juliet during the nurse’s hours off. Her spirits lifted a little.
    She had not seen Juliet since her marriage. They had trained together — Juliet a spare, homely girl with broad, hard-working hands; slow of thought, wiry, lonely, always pressed for money, squeezing through her examinations by a hair’s breadth.
    They’d nursed together, had gone to hurried matinees and cinemas together. Had borrowed each other’s stockings and hats; had jointly hated the head nurse and jointly hero-worshiped Brule Hatterick. Propinquity and shared experience was the basis for their friendship, but it was a real friendship. That is until Rue’s marriage, when Juliet had quietly but quite definitely withdrawn. Rue had always felt that Juliet did not approve of her marriage.
    But at any rate Juliet had come now. Rue moved about the room, pulled a chair nearer the fireplace, saw that cigarettes were at hand. It