Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present pleasures. He did forget--or very nearly so; he did divert himself as opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained; the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a blank. It was, in this instance, death--a rapid series of deaths--that brought it back. Byron's mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the Cam--entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron's high spirits. His letters are very heartbroken and eloquent. "Some curse," he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, "hangs over me and mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate--left almost alone in the world." "At three-and-twenty," he wrote to Dallas, "I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?" To Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says: "The blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."