Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/723

Rh had left it a few months before. In July they had the mortification of finding that Lord Rosebery had given away the coveted post of Morocco, which had been as good as promised to them by Lord Salisbury, to some one else. It was during their few months' absence from England that the change of Government had taken place, and Lord Salisbury's brief-lived Administration of 1886 had yielded place to a Liberal Government. Such are the vicissitudes of official life. Had Lord Salisbury been in office, Sir Richard would probably have got Morocco. It was perhaps all for the best that he did not get the post, although it was a sore disappointment to them at the time. Even Lady Burton came to take this view. She writes: "I sometimes now think that it was better so, and that he would not have lived so long had he had it, for he was decidedly breaking up. The climate did not appear to be the one that suited him, and the anxiety and responsibilities of the post might have hurried on the catastrophe. . . . . It was for the honour of the thing, and we saw for ourselves how uneasy a crown it would be."

Perhaps there was another reason too, for when Lady Burton remonstrated a Minister wrote to her in friendly chaff: "We don't want to annex Morocco, and we know that you two would be Emperor and Empress in about six months." This was an evident allusion to the part which they had played during their brief reign at Damascus. At Trieste there was no room for the eagles to soar; their wings were clipped.

Seeing that the last hope was over, and the one post