Gifted children are a blessing to society, but they can pose their little challenges along the way. Such a gifted child is Ayala Dormer. Quick and witty, and pretty when she smiles, Ayala receives offers of marriage in rather quick succession from a number of men, eligible and ineligible, and she refuses them all, more than once, for a reason she cannot disclose: she is waiting for the appearance of the Angel of Light, the perfect knight: "How could she make her aunt understand that there could be no place in her heart for Tom Tringle seeing that it was to be kept in reserve for some angel of light who would surely make his appearance in due season,--but who must still be there, present to her as her angel of light, even should he never show himself in the flesh." In her adherence to this belief she shows herself to be one of Trollope's Constant Heroines, though surely an outlier among the lot. Others remained constant to better men, some being rewarded in this life, some not. But Ayala's adherence is to her own ideal, thus causing a great deal of trouble to those around her, and, I fear, to a number of readers. This sometimes tedious story is made palatable by Ayala herself, who is as capable of charming the reader as she is of winning the love and loyalty of many of those around her. Her sister's lover Isadore Hamel captures with a vivid simile her bursts of energy, recalling to the reader of Tolstoy the similar sudden rays of sunshine that charmed those who knew Natasha, the heroine of _War and Peace_: "I remember her almost as a child, when she would remain perfectly still for a quarter of an hour, and then would be up and about the house everywhere, glancing about like a ray of the sun reflected from a mirror as you move it in your hand." Ayala and her sister Lucy have been left as senior orphans (a young Victorian woman could not live alone or move about in society unaccompanied) who are taken in by their late mother's brother and sister: one sister to each. Although this becomes a bit complicated when Ayala becomes unsuitable to the aunt who has chosen her and the girls change places, Ayala wins the love of the uncle in each of the two households. In doing so she presents a bit of a problem to each of the aunts--to one because she is a bit poky in assuming the household duties required of a woman in an impecunious household, and to the other because she outshines her aunt's own two daughters.