Mrs. Pepys was “struck mute,” and was silently furious. Outraged Juno towered over the unhappy Pepys, and so to bed without a word, nor slept all night; but about two in the morning Juno became very woman; woke him up and told him she had “turned Roman Catholique,” this being, in the state of politics at that time, probably the thing which she thought would hurt him more than anything else she could say. For the next few days Pepys is sore troubled, and his usual genial babble becomes almost incoherent. The wrong dating and the expressions of “phrenzy” show the mental agony that he passed through, and there can be no doubt that the joy of life passed out of him, probably never more fully to return. The rest of the Diary is written in a style graver than at first--some of it is almost passionate. He describes with much mental agitation how he woke up in the middle of one night, and found his wife heating a pair of tongs red-hot and preparing to pinch his nose; gone for ever were the glad days when he could pull her nose, and the “poor wretch” thought none the worse of the lordly fellow. Twice had he done so, and, as he says, “to offend.” One would like to have Mrs. Pepys’s account of this nose-pulling, and what she really thought of it. Some people have found the struggle of Pepys to cure himself of his infatuation for Deb humorous; to any ordinarily sympathetic soul who reads how he prayed on his knees in his own room that God would give him strength never again to be unfaithful, and how he appealed again and again to his wife to forgive him, and how he, to the best of his ability, avoided the girl, the whole business becomes rather too painful to be funny, even though the unhappy man has the art of making himself ridiculous in nearly every sentence. Finally, in a fury of jealousy, she forced him to write a most insulting letter to Miss Willet, a letter that no woman could ever possibly forgive, and Pepys’s life appears to have settled down again. His sight failing him[9]--it is thought that he suffered from hypermetropia combined with early presbyopia--he abandoned the Diary just at the time when one would have dearly liked to hear more; and we never hear the end either of Deb or of their married happiness. Reading between the lines, one gathers that probably Deb was more sinned against than sinning, and that Mrs. Pepys had more real reason to be angry about many women of whom she had never heard than about the young woman whose flirtation was the actual _casus belli_. It is an unjust world. The two went abroad for a six-months’ tour in France and Holland, and immediately after they returned Mrs. Pepys fell ill of a fever; for a time she appears to have fought it well, but she took a bad turn and died. Considering her youth, the season of the year, and that they had just returned from the Continent, the disease was possibly typhoid. Pepys erected an affectionate memorial to her, and was later on buried by her side. He