Life is never altogether clouded over, and that morning Angela’s horizon had been brightened by two big rays of sunshine that came to shed their cheering light on the grey monotony of her surroundings.  For of late, notwithstanding its occasional spasms of fierce excitement, her life had been as monotonous as it was miserable.  Always the same anxious grief, the same fears, the same longing pressing hourly round her like phantoms in the mist—­no, not like phantoms, like real living things peeping at her from the dark.  Sometimes, indeed, the presentiments and intangible terrors that were gradually strengthening their hold upon her would get beyond her control, and arouse in her a restless desire for action—­any action, it did not matter what—­that would take her away out of these dull hours of unwholesome mental growth.  It was this longing to be doing something that drove her, fevered physically with the stifling air of the summer night, and mentally by thoughts of her absent lover and recollections of Lady Bellamy’s ominous words, down to the borders of the lake on the evening of George’s visit to her father, and once there, prompted her to try to forget her troubles for awhile in the exercise of an art of which she had from childhood been a mistress.

The same feeling it was too, that led her to spend long hours of the day and even of the night, when by rights she should have been asleep, immersed in endless mathematical studies, and in solving, or attempting to solve, almost impossible problems.  She found that the strenuous effort of the brain acted as a counter-irritant to the fretting of her troubles, and though it may seem an odd thing to say, mathematics alone, owing to the intense application they required, exercised a soothing effect upon her.  But, as one cannot constantly sleep induced by chloral without paying for it in some shape or form, Angela’s relief from her cares was obtained at no small cost to her health.  When the same brain, however well developed it may be, has both to study hard and suffer much, there must be a waste of tissue somewhere.  In Angela’s case the outward and visible result of this state of things was to make her grow thinner, and the alternate mental effect to increasingly rarefy an intellect already too ethereal for this work-a-day world, and to plunge its owner into fits of depression which were rendered dreadful by sudden forebodings of evil that would leap to life in the recesses of her mind, and for a moment cast a lurid glare upon its gloom, such as at night the lightning gives to the blackness which surrounds it.

It was in one of the worst of these fits, her “cloudy days” as she would call them to Pigott, that good news found her.  As she was dressing, Pigott brought her a letter, which, recognizing Lady Bellamy’s bold handwriting, she opened in fear and trembling.  It contained a short note and another letter.  The note ran as follows: 

“Dear Angela,

“I enclose you a letter from your cousin George, which contains
what I suppose you will consider good news. For your own sake I
beg you not to send it back unopened as you did the last.