Mrs. Browning was then writing 'Aurora Leigh', and her husband must have been more than ever impressed by her power of work, as displayed by her manner of working. To him, as to most creative writers, perfect quiet was indispensable to literary production. She wrote in pencil, on scraps of paper, as she lay on the sofa in her sitting-room, open to interruption from chance visitors, or from her little omnipresent son; simply hiding the paper beside her if anyone came in, and taking it up again when she was free. And if this process was conceivable in the large, comparatively silent spaces of their Italian home, and amidst habits of life which reserved social intercourse for the close of the working day, it baffles belief when one thinks of it as carried on in the conditions of a Parisian winter, and the little 'salon' of the apartment in the Rue du Colisee in which those months were spent. The poem was completed in the ensuing summer, in Mr. Kenyon's London house, and dedicated, October 17, in deeply pathetic words to that faithful friend, whom the writer was never to see again. The news of his death, which took place in December 1856, reached Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Florence, to be followed in the spring by that of Mrs. Browning's father. Husband and wife had both determined to forego any pecuniary benefit which might accrue to them from this event; but they were not called upon to exercise their powers of renunciation. By Mr. Kenyon's will they were the richer, as is now, I think, generally known, the one by six thousand, the other by four thousand guineas.* Of that cousin's long kindness Mrs. Browning could scarcely in after-days trust herself to speak. It was difficult to her, she said, even to write his name without tears. * Mr. Kenyon had considerable wealth, derived, like Mr. Barrett's, from West Indian estates. I have alluded, perhaps tardily, to Mr. Browning's son, a sociable little being who must for some time have been playing a prominent part in his parents' lives. I saw him for the first time in this winter of 1855-6, and remember the grave expression of the little round face, the outline of which was common, at all events in childhood, to all the members of his mother's family, and was conspicuous in her, if we may trust an early portrait which has recently come to light. He wore the curling hair to which she refers in a later letter, and pretty frocks and frills, in which she delighted to clothe him. It is on record that, on one of the journeys of this year, a trunk was temporarily lost which contained Peni's embroidered trousers, and the MS., whole or in part, of 'Aurora Leigh'; and that Mrs. Browning had scarcely a thought to spare for her poem, in face of the damage to her little boy's appearance which the accident involved.