’At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice; but before sunset of that winter day she knew it, if a judgment may be formed from her face, and attitude of despair, when she alighted from the carriage on the afternoon of her marriage-day.  It was not the traces of tears which won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door.  The bridegroom jumped out of the carriage and walked away.  The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.  The old servant longed to offer his arm to the young, lonely creature, as an assurance of sympathy and protection.  From this shock she certainly rallied, and soon.  The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter.  Her husband bore testimony, after the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more sympathising and agreeable companion, never blessed any man’s home.  When he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so forth, it was when public opinion had gone against him, and when he had discovered that her fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, might be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his part good, as far as she was concerned.

’Silent she was even to her own parents, whose feelings she magnanimously spared.  She did not act rashly in leaving him, though she had been most rash in marrying him.’

Not all at once did the full knowledge of the dreadful reality into which she had entered come upon the young wife.  She knew vaguely, from the wild avowals of the first hours of their marriage, that there was a dreadful secret of guilt; that Byron’s soul was torn with agonies of remorse, and that he had no love to give to her in return for a love which was ready to do and dare all for him.  Yet bravely she addressed herself to the task of soothing and pleasing and calming the man whom she had taken ‘for better or for worse.’

Young and gifted; with a peculiar air of refined and spiritual beauty; graceful in every movement; possessed of exquisite taste; a perfect companion to his mind in all the higher walks of literary culture; and with that infinite pliability to all his varying, capricious moods which true love alone can give; bearing in her hand a princely fortune, which, with a woman’s uncalculating generosity, was thrown at his feet,—­there is no wonder that she might feel for a while as if she could enter the lists with the very Devil himself, and fight with a woman’s weapons for the heart of her husband.

There are indications scattered through the letters of Lord Byron, which, though brief indeed, showed that his young wife was making every effort to accommodate herself to him, and to give him a cheerful home.  One of the poems that he sends to his publisher about this time, he speaks of as being copied by her.  He had always the highest regard for her literary judgments and opinions; and this little incident shows that she was already associating herself in a wifely fashion with his aims as an author.