In the summer of 1644, a slim, sunburnt, foreign-looking youth came back into the London he had left when he was quite a little fellow, nearly five years before. Even now, he was not yet eighteen, and he was still an “Eale”. None of his family expected his return; he had little or no money in his purse, and but vague ideas as to what he was going to do next. How things had changed! Where were the King and Queen, whose hands Frank and he had kissed? And the gay Court that had clustered about them? And his Father! There was no “Great Earl of Cork” any more; no “greatest family in all London,” living “extraordinarily high,” in the House of the Savoy; no child weddings in the royal chapel at Whitehall. What had become of Frank’s wedding shoes, that had been lent afterwards to poor Kynalmeaky? There can have been little but troops, and talk of troops, on the dusty summer roads, as Robert Boyle came towards London; and the quick, hot jargon of names and phrases that was in all men’s mouths—the political idiom of the moment—must have been doubly difficult to understand by the boy who had so long been living in studious exile, speaking “all and allwayes French,” and breathing an atmosphere of profound peace—“the storme having been driving another way.” As he neared London, Robyn’s thoughts must have been still with the Marcombes household, till so recently his home, and the little circle of learned and pleasant Genevan friends whom he had left behind him. For Marcombes had more than fulfilled his trust. No remittances had come to Robert Boyle since the old Earl wrote that letter to Marcombes in March 1642. The boy had been running up a big debt, of money and gratitude alike, to his governour: “As for me,” he had written to his brother Kynalmeaky about Marcombes (the old letter is scarcely decipherable in parts), “he hath so much obliged me the ... despaire of ever being able to desingage myselfe of so many and so greate ... that I have unto him.”[113] And when at last, eight or nine months after the Earl’s death, Robyn, chafing in his idleness and exile, made up his mind to break from his surroundings and find his way home somehow, Marcombes had used his own interest in Geneva to “take up” for his pupil “some slight jewels at a reasonable rate,” by the sale of which, from place to place, the boy might pay his way back to London.