The Howard cousins, Mr. Charles Howard and the Lady Ann, must have been married very shortly after, if not before, Robert Boyle returned from his flying visit to France at the end of 1645. The box of deeds left with Lord Howard of Escrick must have come back into Robyn’s hands. The little lady was to pass out of his life almost before she can be said to have entered it. Twenty years afterwards the Lady Ann was still a young woman, though she was the mother of grown-up children, when Mr. Pepys made the entry in his diary: “I to church: and in our pew there sat a great lady, whom I afterwards understood to be my Lady Carlisle, a very fine woman indeed in person.” CHAPTER IX THE DEARE SQUIRE “... When a Navigator suddenly spies an unknown Vessel afar off, before he has hail’d her, he can scarcely, if at all, conclude what he shall learn by her, and he may from a Ship that he finds perhaps on some remoter coast of _Africa_, or the _Indies_, meet with Informations concerning his own Country and affairs; And thus sometimes a little Flower may point us to the Sun, and by casting our eyes down to our feet, we may in the water see those Stars that shine in the Firmament or highest visible Heaven.”—ROBERT BOYLE: _Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects_. It was in March 1646 that Robert Boyle once more set out from London to ride into Dorsetshire. The Manor of Stalbridge was to be his home for the next five or six years. What fate had overtaken the Earl’s choice dun mare that waited at Lismore for Robyn’s home-coming? The old order had changed; and it was on a borrowed courser, “none of the freest of his legs,” that Robert Boyle made the journey. Lord Broghill was with him, and they had the company of a States-Messenger, who was travelling the same way. The account of their long ride, by Farnham and Winchester and over Salisbury Plain is a little romance in itself.[132] The war was drawing to an end. The King was again at Oxford:—it was not long before his escape, in disguise, to the Scots at Newcastle. The new-modelled Army had very nearly completed its work of conquest in the south-west. The Cavaliers were out between Egham and Farnham, but the travellers dodged them.[133] Farnham was deserted—“all the townsmen having gone to oppose the King’s Army.” Robert Boyle almost lost himself in meditation, “invited by the coolness of the evening and the freshness of the garden,” in which he walked up and down waiting for his supper. The travellers supped, and retired quietly to bed; and it was not till the dead of night that they were roused by a thundering at the chamber door. Robyn slept in his clothes and stockings: “my usual night-posture when I travel.” He produced his bilboa from under his pillow, and a pistol from one of his holsters; his bows and arrows were not far off. But it turned out to be only the town-constable with a group of musketeers, in search of somebody else. “Away went my gentleman,”