And though Trollope had a predilection for the woman who has but one heart to give and never looks back, and though Lady Anna is stated to be one of this sorority--"She had given her heart to Daniel Thwaite, and she had but one heart to give"--it is at least granted to Lady Anna to have some daydreams: "She already began to have feelings about the family to which she had been a stranger before she had come among the Lovels. And if it really would make him happy, this Phoebus, how glorious would that be!" Trollope was never one to use the blue pencil over passages that spelled out how his characters felt. Not for him the implications and brevity of a later day. We see Daniel Thwaite not as a pure young idealist, but as one with a flip side: Sir William Patterson had given him credit for some honesty, but even he had not perceived,--had no opportunity of perceiving,--the staunch uprightness which was, as it were, a backbone to the man in all his doings. He was ambitious, discontented, sullen, and tyrannical. . . . Gentlemen, so called, were to him as savages, which had to be cleared away in order that that perfection might come at last which the course of nature was to produce in obedience to the ordinances of the Creator. Development of this story provides no reassurance that Anna will escape from her troubles; after all, a significant mortality risk does accompany certain Victorian novels. As it turns out, her rescue does require a bit of stage business with the desperate countess attempting to use a pistol properly. But the story does evolve with credible development of character: Anna is indeed tempted to throw over her original lover and opt for the life of ease among the nobility. And the author does tell us, in one of his authorial asides, that if the countess and the lawyers had played their cards more skillfully, they might have persuaded Anna to give up Daniel Thwaite if they had given him his due for integrity and virtue instead of trying to persuade Anna of his greed for her money. However, their efforts to blacken him in her eyes only increased her determination to stick by the humble tailor no matter what. Thwaite is shown to be corrupted to the extent that he will listen to Sir William Patterson, the Solicitor General, the lawyer for the Lovel family, when he explains things to him at the end. Sir William is shown to be the _deus ex machina_ who had also persuaded the Lovel family that there should be some accommodation with the Countess and her daughter Lady Anna. It is true that he had advocated a marriage of convenience, but as this became less likely, he still arranged a compromise between the Lovels and the Countess in court, conceding that the widowed countess's marriage was a legal and binding one. And he did this over the objections of members of the family--chiefly "Uncle Charles," the rector of Yoxham.