He shut himself up in the house to read his wife's diaries and papers.

He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable.

In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.
"For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated.

His letters, and his wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing had occurred to deprive him of his self-command.

But he had at times been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his misdeeds.