he
hazy purple outline of the distant hills. Her face was quite calm, but
it was not that of a happy person; indeed, it gave a distinct idea of
mental suffering. All grief, however acute, is subject to fixed
gradations, and Angela was yet in the second stage. First there is the
acute stage, when the heart aches with a physical pain, and the mind,
filled with a wild yearning or tortured by an unceasing anxiety, well-
nigh gives beneath the abnormal strain. This does not last long, or it
would kill or drive us to the mad-house. Then comes that long epoch of
dull misery, enduring till at last kindly nature in pity rubs off the
rough extremes of our calamity, and by slow but sure degrees softens
agony into sorrow.

This was what she was now passing through, and--as all highly
organized natures like her own are, especially in youth, very
sensitive to those more exquisite vibrations of pain and happiness
that leave minds of a coarser fibre comparatively unmoved--it may be
taken for granted that she was suffering sufficiently acutely.

Perhaps she had never quite realized how necessary Arthur had become
to her, how deep his love had sent its fibres into her heart and inner
self, until he was violently wrenched away from her and she lost all
sight and knowledge of him in the darkness of the outside world. Still
she had made no show of her sorrow; but once, when Pigott told her
some pathetic story of the death of a little child in the village, she
burst into a paroxysm of weeping. The pity for another's pain had
loosed the flood-gates of her own, but it was a performance that she
did not repeat.

But Angela had her anxieties as well as her griefs, and it was over
these former that she was thinking as she sat on the great stone under
the oak. Love is a wonderful quickener of the perceptions, and,
ignorant as she was of all the world's ways, the more she thought over
the terms imposed by her father upon her engagement, the more
distrustful did she grow. Lady Bellamy, too, had been to see her
twice, and on each occasion had inspired her with a lively sense of
fear and repugnance. During the first of these visits she had shown a
perfect acquaintance with the circumstances of her engagement, her
"flirtation with Mr. Heigham," as she was pleased to call it. During
the second call, too, she had been full of strange remarks about her
cousin George, talking mysteriously of "a change" that had come over
him since his illness, and of h