Free No Time For Love (Bantam Series No. 40) by Barbara Cartland Page B

been recently excavated in Egypt, but he had also encouraged her to study the religions and histories of all the ancient civilisations.
    She knew from what she had read that Sorrento was in the Bay of Naples where the rich Romans had built their summer Villas.
    But before the Romans, it had been colonised by Greek settlers who were said to have founded the Temple of Athena on the tip of the promontory.
    In all her reading of history, the Greeks had thrilled Larina as no other people had been able to do.
    She had tried to be enthusiastic about the other cultures and religions which absorbed her father. But the Babylonian and Assyrian gods were heavy and earthy, the Egyptian gods with their animal features grotesque.
    The Greeks had no Kings as splendid as the Pharaohs, no pyramids, no Nile to bring fertility to the land.
    Yet it seemed to Larina that they had discovered something which was different to all the other civilisations—it was light and was personified in their god, Apollo.
    As the god of light, the god of divine radiance, every morning Apollo moved across the sky, intensely virile, flashing with a million points of light, healing everything he touched, germinating the seeds and defying the powers of darkness.
    To Larina he became very real.
    Even as the Greeks had seen him not only as the sun, but as a perfect man, she had visualised him too, and gradually there had grown up a picture of him in her mind.
    He was not only the sun, he was the moon, the planets, the Milky-Way and the stars. He was the sparkle of the waves, the gleam in the eyes. Of all the gods, her books had told her, he was the one who conferred the greatest blessings and was the most generous and the most far-seeing.
    What she had loved was when her father had told her that Apollo’s constant companion was the dolphin, the sleekest and shiniest of all creatures.
    Larina had gone to the Zoo and looked at the dolphins and thought of them as attendant on Apollo, shining as he shone with a light which lit not only the world but men’s minds.
    She tried to tell her father what she felt and thought he understood.
    “I found when I was in Greece,” he said, “that at night when Apollo vanishes the Greeks are miserable. I do not believe there are any other people in the world who keep so many lights burning in their houses.”
    He smiled as he went on:
    “Even during the brightest days they will light their lamps, when they can barely afford the oil.”
    He paused before he added more seriously:
    “Light is their protection against the evil of darkness.”
    “Apollo is light,” Larina told herself.
    If she could not go to Greece before she died, at least in Sorrento she would actually be standing on soil where Greeks had worshipped him.
    It seemed to her in the excitement of what she was planning that it would not be Elvin she was meeting in Sorrento, but Apollo, who had been part of her childhood dreams and who as she grew older had in some way been part of the mind she was developing within herself.
    That, she knew, was what the Greeks had brought to the world, the development not only of a perfect body, but also of a questing mind, a mind such as she had herself where she believed there were no bounds to knowledge and to reason.
    There was however little time for introspection or for thinking too long about Apollo. She had to buy clothes, and for the first time she knew that what she spent would not be extravagant because she would have no sense of guilt about it.
    She rose very early the following morning and hurried to the Bank, cashing Mr. Donaldson’s cheque for one hundred pounds and drawing out what remained of the small balance which had been dwindling away every week since her return to London.
    “I will keep ten pounds for tips and I can spend the rest,” she told herself.
    There would be no chance of her returning from Sorrento, since the twenty-one days would be up very shortly after she arrived there and after that she would have