going through great agony of
mind--above all, that she is ill--ill in body and soul.

"She told me quite calmly, however, that she had made up her mind
to leave you; she said that she had written to you to tell you so.
I asked her if it was because she had ceased to love you. After a
pause she said 'No.' Was it because some one else had come between
you? She threw up her head proudly, and said it was best to be
quite plain and frank. She had met Geoffrey Cliffe again, and she
meant henceforward to share his life. Then she went into the
wildest dreams about going back with him to the Balkans, and
nursing in a hospital, and dying--she hopes!--of hard work and
privations. And all this in a torrent of words--and her eyes
blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the
scenes of her own imagination. She talked of devotion--and of
forgetting herself in other people. I could only tell her, of
course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry
and perversion. She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her
marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder. She shook her head,
and said you would soon forget her. 'If he had loved me he would
never have left me!' she said, again and again, with a passion I
shall never forget.

"Of course that made me very angry, and I described what the
situation had been when you reached London--Lord Parham's state of
mind--and the consternation caused everywhere by the wretched book.
I tried to make her understand what there was at stake--the hopes
of all who follow you in the House and the country--the great
reforms of which you are the life and soul--your personal and
political honor. I impressed on her the endless trouble and
correspondence in which you had been involved--and how meanwhile
all your Home Office and cabinet work had to be carried on as
usual, till it was decided whether your resignation should be
withdrawn or no. She listened with her head on her hands. I think
with regard to the book she is most genuinely ashamed and
miserable. And yet all the time there is this unreasonable, this
monstrous feeling that you should not have left her!

"As to the scandalous references to private persons, she said that
Madeleine Alcot had written to her about the country-house gossip.