'There is one great favour which I think you will be able to do me
without any trouble to yourself, and that is to let my wife come to
your room to see me _between_ her lunch and the meeting of the
House. The greatest nuisance about being out is that I shall have to
go down in the mornings to get my place, and to sit in the library
all day....

'Yours ever,

'Chs. W. D'

When the first trial of the divorce case was over (almost before Mr.
Gladstone's Government had fairly assumed office), in the period during
which Sir Charles designedly absented himself from the House of Commons,

'Chamberlain asked me to act on the Committee to revise my Local
Government Bill, and to put it into a form for introduction to the
House; and I attended at the Local Government Board throughout the
spring at meetings at which Chamberlain, if present, presided.... It
is a curious fact that I often presided over this Cabinet Committee,
though not a member of the Government.'

During the month of February, while the Press campaign against him
was ripening, Sir Charles had little freedom of mind for politics.
Yet this was the moment when Mr. Chamberlain's action, decisive for
the immediate fate of a great question, had to be determined. Sir
Charles had been a conducting medium between Mr. Gladstone and Mr.
Chamberlain. He was so no longer. "I wonder," wrote Chamberlain,
years after, on reading Dilke's Memoir, "what passed in that most
intricate and Jesuitical mind in the months between June and