The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, of this particular episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet, given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd. We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from it--the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who really means what he says. This is the July announcement: "My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was totally _in_sensible to _la belle passion_, and _had_ been all my life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before." Then in August he writes: "After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county newspaper, &c., and kissing one's wife's maid. Seriously, I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but at present----." The word "seriously" there is evidently a _façon de parler_. The writer's mood may be serious, but his intentions evidently are not. It may be doubted whether the thoughts of travel were any more serious, though they lasted longer. In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him; and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a reason--the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better to go, is looking for an excuse to stay.