The problems of the poor are less farcical. Imogene waits to see what the fates will have in store for her as her true and less than worthy lover pursues the Tringle prize. Ayala's sister Lucy and her poor but proud lover Isadore Hamel push themselves along by fits and starts to their goal of matrimony.
And in the midst of this beehive of activity sits Ayala, stuck on high center in her reluctance to commit herself to any suitor who does not meet her impossible standards. Time after time she refuses a perfectly suitable lover, Colonel Jonathan Stubbs. Here the author repeats for the long-suffering reader her reason:
He was not the Angel of Light,—could never be the Angel of Light. There was nothing there of the azure wing upon which should soar the all but celestial being to whom she could condescend to give herself and her love. He was pleasant, good, friendly, kind-hearted,—all that a friend or a brother should be; but he was not the Angel of Light. She was sure of that.
Friends and family make certain allowances for gifted children, and Ayala's friends and family entertain the reader with scheme after scheme for leading her to the light, if not to her own preconception of her Angel of Light. Angels are in Heaven; men of flesh and blood walk the earth, and it takes Ayala a long time to figure this out. And as she does so, the patient reader is diverted by the folly of those on this earth who are far less than angels.
And finally, another compensation for the reader is the author's indulgence in presenting old favorites from a previous novel, The American Senator, written three years before Ayala's Angel. (Both were products of his later years—The American Senator in 1875 and Ayala's Angel in 1878. Trollope's stroke and his death were in late 1882.) He named Larry Twentyman as the hero of The American Senator in its last pages, but Larry did not win the hand of Mary Masters, who married Reginald Morton. Hopes for a match between Larry and Mary's younger sister Kate are mentioned in the conclusion of that novel, but "Kate is still too young and childish to justify any prediction in that quarter." Larry's modest reward at the end of The American Senator is that Mary gets him to swear that he will be her friend.
But in one of the fox hunting scenes in Ayala's Angel, who should appear as one of the popular habitués of the hunt but Larry Twentyman, married less than a year to Mary's sister Kate. Lord Rufford, "now the happy father of half-a-dozen babies," can no longer jump a fence. Her ladyship is always telling him not to jump over anything he can avoid, and he acknowledges that he does "pretty much what her ladyship tells me." And we are told further, "No doubt she generally was right in any assertion she made as to her husband's affairs."
Trollope took care of his heroes. Had he lived long enough, surely Tom Tringle would have reappeared at a later stage in his life with some of the success that the author predicted for him.