Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/211

Rh lodgings. All Burton's manuscripts were destroyed. He took it philosophically enough, and said, "Well, it is a great bore; but I dare say that the world will be none the worse for some of the manuscripts having been burnt." His wife notes this as "a prophetic speech"; and so it was, when we remember the fate of The Scented Garden thirty years after.

The London season came to an end sooner in those days than it does now, and the end of June found the Burtons embarked on a round of visits in country houses. One of the houses they visited at the time was Fryston, Lord Houghton's, and here they met many of the most celebrated people of the day; for wit and beauty, rank and talent, met on common ground around the table of him "whom men call Lord Houghton, but the gods Monckton Milnes." Isabel always looked back on these first seven months of her marriage as the happiest of her life. They were one long honeymoon, "a great oasis"; and she adds, "Even if I had had no other, it would have been worth living for." But alas! the evil day of parting came all too soon. In August Burton had to sail for Fernando Po—"the Foreign Office grave," as it was called—and had perforce to leave his young wife behind him. She went down to Liverpool with him to see him off, and the agony of that first parting is best expressed in her own words:

"I was to go out, not now, but later, and then perhaps not to land, and to return and ply up and down between Madeira and Teneriffe and London; and I, knowing he had Africa at his back, was in a