In May 1856 tidings from London of the illness of Kenyon caused him serious anxiety; he would gladly have hastened to attend upon so true and dear a friend, but this Kenyon would not permit. A month later he and Mrs Browning were in occupation of Kenyon's house in Devonshire Place, which he had lent to them for the summer, but the invalid had sought for restoration of his health in the Isle of Wight. On the day that Mr Barrett heard of his daughter's arrival he ordered his family away from London. Mrs Browning once more wrote to him, but the letter received no answer. "Mama," said little Pen earnestly, "if you've been very, very naughty I advise you to go into the room and say,'_Papa, I'll be dood_.'" But the situation, as Mrs Browning sadly confesses, was hopeless. Some companionship with her sister Arabel and her brothers was gained by a swift departure from London in August for Ventnor whither the Wimpole Street household, leaving its master behind, had been banished, and there "a happy sorrowful two weeks" were spent. At Cowes a grief awaited Browning and his wife, for they found Kenyon kind as ever but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits. A short visit to Mrs Browning's married sister at Taunton closed the summer and autumn in England. Before the end of October they were on their way to Florence. "The Brownings are long gone back now," wrote Dante Rossetti in December, "and with them one of my delights--an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?--taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn."