text:  While however she awaited an opportunity of communicating with a faithful messenger who had sometimes conveyed notes from him when accident prevented their meeting she was attacked with illness a smart febrile indisposition--the result no doubt of the mental disquietude she had undergone--and several weeks elapsed before she was again able to reach the little conservatory which opening on the lower apartments of the mansion constituted the utmost limits of that domestic boundary beyond which she was not permitted to proceed