“Unwilling to confide to me the difficulties by which she was assailed, unable alone to steer among the rocks that impeded her course, Theresa at length adopted the bold measure of confiding her whole tale to her royal mistress; whose knowledge of the king's infidelities was already too accurate to admit of an increase of affliction from this new proof; and on receiving a letter from the avowed friend of her husband--the grateful patron of her dead father--the august Father of his people, containing the most insolent declarations of passion, she vindicated her innocence by placing it in the hands of the Queen; at the same time entreating permission that her further services might be dispersed with. Her Majesty's reply, equally gratifying and affectionate, you have already seen; and it was in savage and unmanly revenge towards Theresa, for the frankness and decision of her conduct, that the king had directed his favorite to enclose me that letter whose sudden perusal had wrought the destruction of my unhappy wife. You will easily conceive that the terms of my answer to the Duke of Buckingham were those of unmeasured indignation--yet he, the parasite, the ready instrument of royal vice, and the malignant associate of Charles in his last act of premeditated cruelty, suffered the accusations of the injured husband to pass unnoticed and unrepelled; and I am persuaded that nothing but the dread of exposure prevented me from feeling the full abuse of the power of the crown by the master I had served with so much fidelity and affection. I have never since that period held direct or indirect communication with a court where the basest treachery had been my only reward. “For many months the paroxysms of Lady Greville's distemper were so violent as to require the strictest confinement; and the medical man who attended her assured me that when this state of irritation should subside, she would either be restored entirely to the full exercise of her mental faculties, or be plunged into a state of apathy, of tranquil but confirmed dejection, from which, although it might not affect her bodily health, she would never recover. How anxiously did I watch for this crisis of her disorder! and yet at times I scarcely wished her to awake to a keener sense of her afflictions; for being incapable of recognising my person in my frequent visits to her chamber, I have heard her address me in her wanderings for pardon and pity. 'Forgive me, Greville, forgive me,' she would say. 'Remember how forlorn a wretch I shall become, when thou too, like the rest, shalt abandon and persecute me. Am I not thy wedded wife, and as faithful as I am miserable! am I not the mother of thy child? and yet I know not;--for I seek my poor infant, and they will not, will not, give it to me--tell me,' she whispered with a ghastly smile, 'have they buried it in the raging sea with him whom I must not name?'