On the evening of Saturday, July 18th, Sir Charles Dilke was entertained at a dinner given by the Reform Club--a very rare distinction--to celebrate the passing of the Redistribution Bill into law. From this ceremony, which crowned and recognized his greatest personal achievement, he returned late, and found at his house a letter from an old family friend who asked him to call on the following Sunday morning on grave business. He then learnt that the wife of a Liberal member of Parliament had volunteered a 'confession' to her husband, in which she stated that she had been unfaithful to him with Sir Charles immediately after her marriage. His note in his private diary on Sunday is: '19th.--Early heard of the charge against me. Put myself in hands of J. B. Balfour, and afterwards of Chamberlain and James.' Later Sir Charles Dilke went down to Taplow, and spent the day there. This accusation found him separated from his future wife by many thousand miles; worse than that, she had been dangerously ill; the risk to her of a telegraphed message must be great; yet there was the chance from day to day that newspaper rumour might anticipate direct tidings from him to her. He was 'in as great misery as perhaps ever fell upon a man.' He returned next morning to preside at the last meeting of the Commission on Housing, when, he says, 'the Prince of Wales proposed a vote of thanks to me in an extremely cordial speech.' From that attitude of friendliness the future King Edward never departed. 'I had a dinner-party in the evening, which was one of several in preparation for our Ward meetings in Chelsea, which I had to continue to hold in spite of my private miseries. 'I was engaged on the one night for which none of these dinners had been fixed to dine with Lord and Lady Salisbury, and to attend the Princess of Wales's Ball at Marlborough House, and I wrote to put off my engagements, for which I was much blamed; but I think that I was right.' For three or four days Sir Henry James, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. J. B. Balfour, the Lord Advocate of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, moved to secure a court of inquiry which would act without prejudice to the right of legal action. But within the week it was certain that public proceedings would be taken. The blow had come suddenly; it came with dramatic incidence at the moment when Sir Charles's prestige was most effectively recognized; and from the moment that it fell he knew that the whole tenor of his life was altered. On Thursday, July 23rd, four days afterwards, he wrote in his Diary of the time this judgment: