ood-bye; remember me to
Angela. By the way, I don't know if you have heard that George has met
with a repulse in that direction; he does not intend to press matters
any more at present; but, of course, the agreement holds all the same.
Nobody knows what the morrow may bring forth."

"Where you and my amiable cousin are concerned, I shall be much
surprised if it does not bring forth villany," thought Philip, as soon
as he heard the front door close. "I suppose that it must be done
about Pigott. Curse that woman, with her sorceress face. I wish I had
never put myself into her power; the iron hand can be felt pretty
plainly through her velvet glove."

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 cons