The pictures, and every movable that could be converted into cash, were, by Byron's orders, to be sold. 'All I want is a few thousand pounds, and then, Adieu. You shan't be troubled with me these ten years, if ever.' Clearly, there must have been something more than a passing fancy which could have induced Byron to sacrifice his chances of selling Newstead, for the sake of a few thousand pounds of ready-money. It _had been_ his intention to accompany Lord and Lady Oxford on their travels, but this project was abandoned. After three weeks--spent in running backwards and forwards between Salt Hill and London--Byron confided his troubles to Augusta. She was always his rock of refuge in all his deeper troubles. Augusta Leigh thought that absence might mend matters, and tried hard to keep her brother up to his resolve of going abroad; she even volunteered to accompany him. But Lady Melbourne--who must have had a prurient mind--persuaded Byron that the gossips about town would not consider it 'proper' for him and his sister to travel alone! As Byron was at that time under the influence of an irresistible infatuation, Lady Melbourne's warning turned the scale, and the project fell through. Meanwhile the plot thickened. Something--he told Moore--had ruined all his prospects of matrimony. His financial circumstances, he said, were mending; 'and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife.' In July he still wishes to get out of England. 'They had better let me go,' he says; 'one can die anywhere.' On August 22, after another visit to Salt Hill, Byron writes to Moore: 'I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.' A week later he wrote again to Moore: 'I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but at present....' Moore suggested that Byron's case was similar to that of the youth apostrophized by Horace in his twenty-seventh ode, and invited his confidence: 'Come, whisper it--the tender truth-- To safe and friendly ears! What! Her? O miserable youth! Oh! doomed to grief and tears! In what a whirlpool are you tost, Your rudder broke, your pilot lost!'