Later acquaintance, indeed, apart from intimacy, can easily be demonstrated, in spite of the suppressions of the biographers. "I remember meeting her," Byron himself said to Medwin, "after my return from Greece"; and the statement is confirmed, as Medwin's statements generally need to be, from other sources. It appears from Byron's own letters that Mary Chaworth, or some member of her family, took charge of his robes after one of his attendances at the House of Lords; and a letter from Mary Chaworth to Byron, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is printed by Mr. Edgcumbe. It speaks of a seal which Byron was having made for her. The seal is still in existence, and is in the possession of the Musters family. The approximate date of its presentation is fixed by an entry in Byron's journal: "Mem. I must get a toy to-morrow for Eliza, and send the device for the seals of myself and ----." Here, at any rate, we get one clear case in which the asterisks in the Journal not only appear to indicate Mary Chaworth, but cannot possibly indicate anybody else. It does not follow, of course, that we are entitled to insert her name wherever we encounter asterisks--for Byron and his editors have, from time to time, had various reasons for thus concealing various names; but the cases in which the asterisks do refer to her are, when once this clue is provided, tolerably easy to distinguish. Furnished with the clue, we can at once unravel the skein of events and construct a consistent picture of these critical months in Byron's career; and we may begin with the picture which he drew of himself to Medwin: "I was at this time," he says, "a mere Bond Street lounger--a great man at lobbies, coffee and gambling houses: my afternoons were passed in visits, luncheons, lounging, and boxing--not to mention drinking." This is true, and yet, at the same time, it is not true. The picture is, at once, confirmed by the Letters and the Journal and contradicted by them. It is a picture in which, so to say, all the lights are glaring, and all the shadows are left out. The truest thing in it is the after-thought, added a few sentences lower down; "Don't suppose, however, that I took any pleasure in all these excesses." In that moody claim we get, of course, the reflection, or recollection, of the Byronic pose; and at this period, if not at all periods, there was grim reality behind the pose, and Byron fully justifies the description of him as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude.