“When Sir John Williams came to see me, he looked white and tired and, finding my temperature was normal, he said fervently: 

“‘Thank you, Mrs. Asquith.’

“I was too weak and uncomfortable to realise all that had happened; and what I suffered from the smallest noise I can hardly describe.  I would watch nurse slowly approaching and burst into a perspiration when her cotton dress crinkled against the chintz of my bed.  I shivered with fear when the blinds were drawn up or the shutters unfastened; and any one moving up or down stairs, placing a tumbler on the marble wash-hand-stand or reading a newspaper would bring tears into my eyes.”

In connection with what I have quoted out of my diary here it is not inappropriate to add that I lost my babies in three out of my five confinements.  These poignant and secret griefs have no place on the high-road of life; but, just as Henry and I will stand sometimes side by side near those little graves unseen by strangers, so he and I in unobserved moments will touch with one heart an unforgotten sorrow.

Out of the many letters which I received, this from our intimate and affectionate friend, Lord Haldane, was the one I liked best: 

My dear friend,

I cannot easily tell you how much touched I was in the few minutes I spent talking to you this afternoon, by what I saw and what you told me.  I left with the sense of witnessing triumph in failure and life come through death.  The strength that is given at such times arises not from ignoring loss, or persuading oneself that the thing is not that is; but from the resolute setting of the face to the East and the taking of one step onwards.  It is the quality we touch—­it may be but for a moment—­not the quantity we have, that counts.  “All I could never be, all that was lost in me is yet there—­in His hand who planned the perfect whole.”  That was what Browning saw vividly when he wrote his Rabbi Ben Ezra.  You have lost a great joy.  But in the deepening and strengthening the love you two have for each other you have gained what is rarer and better; it is well worth the pain and grief—­the grief you have borne in common—­and you will rise stronger and freer.

We all of us are parting from youth, and the horizon is narrowing, but I do not feel any loss that is not compensated by gain, and I do not think that you do either.  Anything that detaches one, that makes one turn from the past and look simply at what one has to do, brings with it new strength and new intensity of interest.  I have no fear for you when I see what is absolutely and unmistakably good and noble obliterating every other thought as I saw it this afternoon.  I went away with strengthened faith in what human nature was capable of.

May all that is highest and best lie before you both.

Your affec. friend,

R. B. Haldane.

I was gradually recovering my health when on May the 21st, 1895, after an agonising night, Sir John Williams and Henry came into my bedroom between five and six in the morning and I was told that I should have to lie on my back till August, as I was suffering from phlebitis; but I was too unhappy and disappointed to mind.  It was then that my doctor, Sir John Williams, became my friend as well as my nurse, and his nobility of character made him a powerful influence in my life.