They had remained friends until 1830, and had then quarrelled, not about Byron, but about the appointment of a new trustee under a settlement. After that, they had ceased to see each other; and the Reigate interview, of which Robertson drew up a memorandum, was avowedly and admittedly arranged because Lady Byron desired, and expected, to receive a confession before a witness of unimpeachable integrity. Nothing is more obvious than that Lady Byron would have had no need to solicit a verbal confession in 1851 if she had succeeded in extracting a written confession in 1816; and it is common ground that, in 1851, Mrs. Leigh not only confessed nothing, but denied that she had anything to confess. The whole story of the confession, therefore, vanishes like smoke; and one is free, at last, to quit this painful part of the subject. It was necessary to dwell on it carefully and at length on account of the sophistical cobwebs spun round it by Lord Lovelace's awkward hands and because, while justice injoined the vindication of Lord Byron, his biographer could not let any prudish scruples or false delicacy withhold him from the task of definitely clearing the memory of Byron's sister from the shameful aspersions cast upon it, by Byron's grandson. But one, nevertheless, gets away from it with relief, and returns with a sense of recovered freedom to the facts of Byron's career at the time when the storm broke about his head and drove him from the country. CHAPTER XXII BYRON'S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT--HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH JANE CLAIRMONT Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as Byron "woke up one morning and found himself famous," so the British public woke up one morning and found itself virtuous, with the result that Byron was hooted and hounded out of England. The picture, like all Macaulay's pictures, was overdrawn and over-coloured. The life of the country, and even of the capital, went on pretty much as usual in spite of Byron's dissensions with his wife; and Byron himself kept up appearances fairly well, going to the theatre, entertaining Leigh Hunt, Kinnaird, and other friends at dinner, and corresponding with Murray about the publication of his poems. But, nevertheless, many circumstances combined to make him feel uncomfortable. Invitations ceased to be showered upon him; and "gross charges" continued to be whispered in spite of Lady Byron's disavowal. The grounds of the separation not being known, every one was free to conjecture his own solution of the mystery. There seemed little doubt, at any rate, that Byron had forsaken his lawful wife's society for that of the nymphs of Drury Lane; and it was quite certain that he had failed to pay the Duchess of Devonshire her rent. The only possible reply to these allegations was that they were no part of the business of the people who made such a fuss about them. The fuss being made, the most reasonable course was to go abroad until the hubbub ceased.