Mr.Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and good feeling.

"When I first heard of it," he said, "I resented it, of course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr.Blunt's character, and denounced it accordingly.

What I have since learned leads me to fear that he really may have said something capable of being construed in this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the exasperation produced by finding himself locked up." I heard the story of Mr.Balfour's meeting with Mr.Blunt very plainly and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House, in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of Britons as of Bedouins.

In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to suppose it possible that Mr.Blunt can have really deceived himself as to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr.Balfour.
This is paying a compliment to Mr.Blunt's common sense at the expense of his imagination.

In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt said yesterday of Mr.Blunts tale of horror, quite "open to question." But, as Mr.Blunt himself has sung, "'Tis conscience makes us sinners, not our sin," and I have no doubt the author of the _Poems of Proteus_ really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own dark and bloody designs.