It is not so certain that Milton’s prose would have pleased the boy;—the church-politics, the anti-episcopal pamphlets, and the divorce tract that had recently been the topic of conversation in London. There is no trace of a personal friendship between Milton and Robert Boyle. Their paths constantly crossed, but they were to walk apart. Boyle deplored religious controversy, and did not sympathise with the sects and sectaries. And yet it is here that the possibility of the “accident” comes in. For Lady Ranelagh was a very progressive Puritan, whose interests were already bound up with the Parliamentarian Party and its reforms. She must have known Milton well personally or by reputation at this time, and she can have had no bad opinion of him or his prose-writings, or she would not have sent, as she did, her own nephew, young Lord Barrymore, to be one of Milton’s pupils. Barrymore, only four years younger than Robert Boyle, was one of Milton’s resident pupils when, in September 1645, Milton removed from Aldersgate Street into a larger house in Barbican with the purpose of being able to board a larger number of boys. Lady Ranelagh was later on to send her own boy, Dick Jones, to be taught by Milton; her friendship for Milton was to endure through many troublous years; in his own words she stood “in place of all kith and kin”[118] to him in his blindness and solitude; and her good offices seem not to have stopped even there. May it have been through this Diodati-Milton-Hartlib connexion that Robert Boyle and his sister Ranelagh were brought together? But London was not so large a place in 1644. Cousin Croone was presumably still at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, and people met in Cheapside in those days. Had not Dr. John Diodati himself, on his one visit to London in 1627, run up against the very man he most wanted to meet—Mr. Bedell, afterwards the Bishop—in Cheapside? Whatever the “accident” was, Lady Ranelagh received her young brother with open arms. Her address in that summer of 1644 still remains uncertain, though not long afterwards she seems to have been living in the house in the Old Mall which was to be her home to the end of her life.[119] It may have been in Pall Mall that Robyn came knocking at his sister’s door. Lord Ranelagh—he had taken his seat in the House of Peers in February 1644—was probably in Ireland, for there is no mention of him as one of the family circle at this time; and the husband and wife, as the years went on, had lived more and more apart. Lord Ranelagh, who had run through his own and his wife’s money, lived in Ireland, and Lady Ranelagh in London. She was in the receipt, for some reason unexplained, of a pension from Government of £4 a week, and was otherwise helped by the members of her own family.