"If tears which you saw, and know I am not apt to shed,--if the agitation in which I parted from you,--agitation which you must have perceived through the whole of this most nervous affair, did not commence until the moment of leaving you approached,--if all I have said and done, and am still but too ready to say and do, have not sufficiently proved what my real feelings are, and must ever be towards you, my love, I have no other proof to offer.... Is there anything in earth or heaven that would have made me so happy as to have made you mine long ago? You know I would with pleasure give up all here and beyond the grave for you, and in refraining from this, must my motives be misunderstood? I care not who knows this, what use is made of it,--it is to you and to you only that they are, _yourself_, I was and am yours freely and entirely to obey, to honour, love, and fly with you when, where, and how yourself _might_ and _may_ determine."
It will surprise no one to learn that a few months later Byron himself put an end to the _liaison_; his love had never been anything but the kind of reflected love which imitates in a mirror all the motions of the flame, without fire of its own. Meeting Byron at a ball soon afterwards, Lady Caroline, maddened by his indifference, seized the first sharp thing that she could lay hold of--some say a pair of scissors, others a broken glass--and tried to cut her throat with it. After the ineffectual attempt at suicide, she (according to Countess Guiccioli) made "the most incredible promises" to a young nobleman on condition that he would challenge and kill the faithless one; nevertheless she herself soon called at her quondam lover's apartments, "by no means with the intention of cutting either her own throat or his." He was not at home. The words which she wrote on a title-page of a book she found on his table, inspired the epigram: "Remember thee!" which is to be found amongst Byron's poems.
Pining for revenge, Lady Caroline now seized her pen and wrote the novel, _Glenarvon_, which came out at the most unfortunate moment possible for Byron, namely, just after his wife had left him, and was one of the most active ingredients in the ferment of public disapproval. The book, which has as its motto two lines from _The Corsair_:--