Read Online An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition by Cartland Barbara - Free Book Online

you.”
    “For no reason,” Lizbeth said.
    Phillida’s tired and miserable face suddenly lit with a smile.
    “You are very attractive, little Lizbeth. I hope you will find someone who loves you and whom you can love in return.”
    Lizbeth was silent, and Phillida went on,
    “What looks God has given me have brought me nothing but unhappiness. If I had been born plain or deformed, no man would have wanted me. It would have been easy for them to slip away from the world and be forgotten; but as it is...”
    She made a gesture with her hands.
    “As it is, Father is proud of you,” Lizbeth said. “He likes to see you admired, he wants you to be married.”
    “Yes, I know that,” Phillida said, “and he is ashamed to think I have remained single for so long. In some ways he thinks it is a reflection on himself. He is proud of his own charms and cannot credit that he has children who do not attract the opposite sex as readily as he does.”
    “He has often talked about Sir Richard and Tom and wondered why they never came here any more. I wondered, too. Oh, Phillida! Are you sure that you would like to be shut away in a Convent?”
    “I want it more than anything else in the whole world,” Phillida answered.
    Her face lit up, her eyes were shining and there was a look of spiritual ecstasy in her face which Lizbeth had never seen there before. She gave a little sigh. She realised that Phillida was asking for the moon.
    Nunneries no longer existed in England. They had been abolished by Henry VIII, reinstated by Mary and abolished again by Elizabeth. The latter had made a clean sweep of her sister’s efforts and the nuns had fled to Ireland and France, after which no one heard any more of them. If they communicated with their families it was kept a close secret.
    Lizbeth knew there was not a chance of Phillida’s attaining her desire, but she was kind enough not to say so. Instead, she put out her hand towards her half-sister and for the moment the two girls looked at each other, linked together in the dark shadows of the curtained four-poster.
    “If Father should discover what you are he would kill you – I think,” Lizbeth said in a low voice.
    “Yes, I know that,” Phillida replied.
    She spoke steadfastly with a strength which Lizbeth had never known she possessed. Then, as they sat there silent, one of the candles spluttered in its wick and went out. Lizbeth remembered Francis.
    “I must leave you now so that you will go to sleep,” she said to Phillida. “Promise me that you will cry no more.”
    “No more tonight. Thank you for comforting me, little Lizbeth. I somehow believe that things are not as hopeless as I thought they were earlier today. God will help me.”
    “I pray that He will,” Lizbeth answered.
    She bent to kiss Phillida, tucked her up and turned towards the door, blowing out the remaining candle.
    “Good night,” she whispered, her hand on the latch.
    “God bless you, Lizbeth,” Phillida replied.
    Lizbeth crept back to her room. Her thoughts were chaotic and she wondered, as she slipped between the sheets, whether what she had learned was true or whether it had just been a strange dream which had come to her in the night. She could hardly credit that Phillida, the quiet, rather stupid sister of whom she had often felt slightly contemptuous, was really the same Phillida whom she had just left – a woman fraught with emotion, fighting a lone battle for the sake of her Faith.
    Religious feelings ran high in the country and there was so much controversy that Lizbeth was content for it to mean little more to her than noisy, fiercely-contested arguments and lengthy, boring services every Sunday in the village church. There in the big family pew, with its high, oak sides screening them from the congregation, her father usually slept while her stepmother read from a book, Lizbeth could remember fidgeting endlessly as a child until, as the years passed, she managed to let her mind slip away to