Forces, however, making for the revival of the scandal were nevertheless at work. Byron smarted under social ostracism and resented it. Though Lady Byron had never made any formal charge to which he could reply, but had, on the contrary, formally retracted all "gross" charges, he continued to be embittered by suggestions of mysterious iniquities, and his anger found expression alike in his letters and in his poems. To a certain extent he defended himself by taking the offensive. He caused notes on his case to be privately distributed. He wrote "at" Lady Byron, in the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold," in "Don Juan," and elsewhere. A good deal of his correspondence, printed by Moore, expressed his opinion of her in terms very far from flattering. Under these combined influences public opinion veered round--the more readily because Byron was held to have made ample atonement for his faults, whatever they might have been, by sacrificing his life in the cause of Greek independence. Lady Byron was now thought, not indeed to have erred in any technical sense, but to have made an undue fuss about very little, and to have been most unwomanly in her frigid consciousness of rectitude. The world, in short, was more certain now that she had been "heartless" than that she had been "always in the right." Naturally, her temptation to "answer back" was strong. She could not very well answer back by preferring any monstrous indictment in public. That course was not only to be avoided in her daughter's interest, but might also have involved her in an action for defamation of character on the part of Mrs. Leigh--an action which she could not have met with any adequate defence. Of that risk, indeed, she had been warned by her friend Colonel Doyle, in a letter printed in "Astarte" to which it will presently be necessary to return--a letter in which she had been urgently recommended to "act as if a time might possibly arise when it might be necessary for you to justify yourself." But if she could not answer back in public, at least she could answer back in private.