A Christmas Promise Read Free Page B

been accustomed to be and as you deserve to be. Forget me, Ellie. Pretend in your mind and in your heart that I never existed.”
    But he had concluded the letter with a passionate affirmation of his love for her and an assurance that she would be in his heart every moment for the rest of his life.
    She knew it was hopeless. Dear proud, foolish Wilfred. She knew that she would never succeed in changing his mind. And so he was lost to her, because she was rich and he was poor. Although they were second cousins. Perhaps because they were second cousins. Papa disapproved of Wilfred and his father because they had not been as successful as he. And Papa had always opposed her growing attachment to Wilfred, fanned by frequent meetings at family gatherings, calling it puppy love, chucking her under the chin and assuring her that he had far more satisfactory plans for her than marriage to Wilfred.
    There was an earl. Eleanor still had her eyes closed. She let her head drop sideways so that her temple rested against a cold pane of the window. She did not know his name or anything at all about him except that Papa had set about netting him for her and was confident of success. That meant that he would succeed. Papa always did when he set his mind to something.
    Papa wanted her to marry an earl. A member of the peerage. A member of the
ton.
She shuddered and remembered all the humiliation of the summer two years before spent in the country with her school friend Pamela, Lord Hutchins’s daughter. She had been seventeen, fresh from school, eager for life and for fun and for love, and quite unconcerned about the fact that she was different in one essential way from every other guest. She had never even heard the word “cit” before that summer. But she had come to know it well, and to know that it was her nickname among the guests and that it was a derogatory term. It meant that she was a member of a lower class, an upstart class, a vulgar class. She had seen nothing but disdain in the eyes of the other ladies and contempt in the eyes of the gentlemen—except that the gentlemen had also assumed that a cit would be freer with her favors than a lady. Eleanor shuddered again, in part at the way she had reacted to it all—fighting back with instinct more than reason.
    Papa wanted her to marry an earl. And the trouble was that she would not have the heart to say no. Not now. If Wilfred had replied differently, perhaps she would have made a stand. Undoubtedly, she would have made a stand. But without Wilfred there seemed no point in anything. Certainly not in defiance. And how could she defy a dying father who had been everything to her through her life?
    Eleanor bit her lip, but unbidden tears squeezed between her eyelids anyway. Papa wanted so badly to see her well settled before he died. It had always been the pinnacle of ambition for him, he had told her just a few weeks before—the conversation that had prompted her letter to Wilfred—to marry her into the nobility, into the landed classes. He would die a happy man, he had assured her, if he could see her become a lady, which was what he had trained her all her life to become.
    Perhaps Papa did not realize, she thought, that only one thing could create a lady—birth. She might marry a dozen earls, but she would still be a cit. For all of the rest of her life she would be despised. She did not want to be despised. She wanted to be loved. It was all she had ever wanted. Just simply to be loved. Was it a great deal to ask?
    Obviously it was. She spread her hand over the letter on her lap without looking down at it.
    Wilfred!
    But the sound she had been half listening for reached her at that moment and put an abrupt end to her painful thoughts and her self-pity. She jumped to her feet and raced from her room and down the stairs to find that the person who had entered the house was indeed her father. Looking stooped and gaunt and exhausted.
    “Papa,” she said, waving away the servant