The woman that had been given him for wife twenty-five years before was still in France. But she was then about to visit her husband for the purpose of obtaining from him provision for the support of herself and daughter in southern France. After repeated delays Mrs. Sterne reached Coxwold on the second of October. As Sterne looks forward to this visit, his “heart sinks down to the earth.” He would be in health and strength, if it were not for this cloud hanging over him with “its tormenting consequences.” Taking this distress for theme, his friend Hall-Stevenson wrote “an affecting little poem” which Sterne promised to transcribe for Eliza. When illness prevented Mrs. Sterne from setting out from France as soon as she expected, her husband became impatient at the detention, for he was anxious “to know certainly _the day and hour of this Judgment_.” “The period of misery,” covering a month at length came and passed. Half in love with her husband because of his humanity and generosity, Mrs. Sterne went to York to spend the winter. In the spring she was to retire into France, “whence,” says Sterne, “she purposes not to stir, till her death.—& never, has she vow’d, will give me another sorrowful or discontented hour.” These last weeks with his wife brought to Sterne one consolation more.—Mrs. Sterne confessed to her husband that at the time of her marriage she made herself out ten years younger than she really was. “God bless,” he writes to Eliza, “& make the remainder of her Life happy—in order to w^{ch}. I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year.” Much that was said, in an earlier volume, of the _Sentimental Journey_ might be appropriately repeated here of the _Journal to Eliza_. Once Sterne was at the point of dying broken hearted because of his separation from Miss Lumley. Twenty-five years after marriage she became “a restless unreasonable Wife whom neither gentleness or generosity can conquer.” With Mrs. Draper, Sterne was no doubt more deeply in love than he had ever been with his wife. He would have married her, but for the barriers. And yet, had he married her, the time must surely have come when even Eliza would have found her place supplanted. For sincere as Sterne may have been for the moment, his emotions were fugitive and volatile. If one woman were not at hand for evoking them, another would answer as well; if not one object, why then another. Whole passages—and this is one of the Sterne curiosities—are taken from the letters to Miss Lumley and carried over into the _Journal to Eliza_, as applicable, with a few minor changes, to the new situation. It was hardly more than writing “Molly” for “Fanny,” or “our faithful friend Mrs. James” for “the good Miss S——” and the old “sentimental repasts” once graced by Miss Lumley could be served anew for Eliza.[4]