Call of the Heart Read Online Free PDF

rise.
    She was sensible enough to realise that she was growing weaker and that her illness after Christmas had swept away almost the last resistance she had to her Step-mother’s cruelty.
    Often she had been so unhappy that she had wanted to pray to die, and then she thought of her mother and would not allow herself to show such cowardice.
    Her mother, small, gentle, and fragile, had always admired people who were brave.
    “We all of us have deeds of valour that we must do in our lives,” she had said to Lalitha once, “but the hardest of them all do not demand physical bravery but rather mental and spiritual.”
    To let Lady Studley kill her, Lalitha thought, would be the coward’s way out of the intolerable hell in which she found herself after her father’s death.
    Even after living for two years with her Step-mother she could hardly believe that the horrors that she experienced every day were not just part of a nightmare.
    To look back on her childhood was to remember the happiness of years which seemed always to be filled with sunshine.
    It was true that her mother was not strong and as the years passed there was not enough money to do the things they wanted.
    Neither of these had counted beside the inexpressible joy of being together.
    Her father, a large, good-humoured, kindly man, had been both loved and respected by those who worked and lived on their Estate.
    It was, Lalitha realised as she grew older, his kind disposition which kept him from being prosperous.
    He could never bring himself to push a farmer for the rent he owed or to evict a tenant.
    “I felt I had to give him another chance,” he would say a little shamefacedly.
    So there was never enough money for repairs, new implements, or for her mother and herself.
    Her mother had not minded.
    “I am so lucky,” she would often say to Lalitha, “both in my husband and in my daughter. To me they are the most wonderful people in the world!”
    Their days had always seemed full, although there had been few parties or Social events because their house, which had been in the Studley family for five generations, was in an isolated part of the country.
    From a farming point of view the land was excellent, but their neighbours had been few and far between.
    “When you are older you must go to London and enjoy the Balls, Assemblies, and Receptions that I found so entrancing when I was a girl,” Lalitha’s mother would say.
    “I am perfectly happy to be here with you and Papa,” Lalitha would reply.
    “I suppose every mother wants her daughters to be Social success,” her mother said a little wistfully, “and yet I had my London Season and came back to marry the man I had known since we were children together.”
    She smiled and added:
    “But it was going out into the world, meeting the elegant and important men in London, which convinced me that your father was the only man I loved and with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”
    “You were lucky, Mama,” Lalitha said once, “your father’s Estates marched with Papa’s so you had a suitor on the doorstep, so to speak. There is no-one here for me.”
    “That is true,” her mother agreed, “and that is why we must save, Lalitha, every penny we can so that when you are seventeen and a half you can dazzle the Beau Monde with your pretty face.”
    “I shall never be as beautiful as you, Mama.”
    “You flatter me!” her mother protested.
    “Papa says there has never been anyone as lovely as you, and I feel that is true.”
    “If you can convince me that you think the same when you return from London, I will believe you,” her mother had replied.
    But there had been no London Season for Lalitha.
    Her mother had died one cold Winter unaccountably and without any warning.
    For Lalitha, like her father, it was a disaster so tremendous and unexpected that it was difficult to believe that it had really happened.
    One moment her mother was there laughing, looking after them, charming