Read "The Hidden Treasure" by Lucy Ellen Guernsey online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Jack and Sister Barbara were soon on the best of terms, and he learned to love the kind genial lady as well as if he had known her all his life. He was both amused and touched to see how she enjoyed the ease and freedom of her present life, and with what a zest she entered into all the family plans. She was very particular in observing all the canonical hours, and she fasted on Fridays, as indeed they all did, but her fasts were very different matters from poor Anne's, who ate hardly enough at any time to keep soul and body together. Sister Barbara seemed to think it quite enough to abstain from flesh, like the rest of the family, and she cooked many nice little messes for fast-days, telling Anne when she objected that they were just such as they always had in the convent. She took a deep interest in all the children in the neighborhood, especially in the babies, and showed a remarkable skill in tending the latter, which certainly must have come by nature.
"For, do you know," she said one day, "I never saw a little babe near at hand till I saw Dame Burton's?"