When Dorothy was twenty-one she went with her brother to France. At the Isle of Wight they were joined by young Mr. William Temple who promptly fell in love with Dorothy because of the spirited way she met a difficult situation. Her brother had written on the window pane at the inn some phrases objectionable to the Puritans, and the whole party was arrested. Then Dorothy, relying upon the general chivalrous attitude towards women, took the blame upon herself, and they were set free. The courtship thus begun was destined to last seven years. There were few meetings and the correspondence was carried on with all possible secrecy, for both the Osbornes and the Temples had other plans for the young people. It was a difficult seven years for Dorothy. The Osbornes lived at Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, a lonely and not very interesting region. Dorothy's mother died in 1650. After a long illness, during which she was his constant attendant, her father died in 1654. During these years her brother was the only one of the family with her in the strange old house. And from him came her chief trial, for it was the effort of his life to see her well married. Young men, middle-aged men, old men, aspired to be Mistress Dorothy's "servants." The ancient Priory saw a train of lovers sent away unsatisfied. Dorothy gave all sorts of reasons for her fastidious and critical attitude towards her suitors--all reasons but the real one. Mr. Temple had no assured income, Dorothy but a small dowry, and no families in their rank of life could be expected to sanction so imprudent a choice. In the meantime silence and faithfulness was the only resource of the impecunious lovers. It was a hard fate, but not without compensations for later generations, for if they had married happily on coming out of France there would have been no bundle of letters in the old cabinet at Sheen. There are various indications that Dorothy had numerous correspondents. That they did not save her letters is our great loss, for we can imagine few more delightful ways of being inducted into the life of the times than through the letters of Mistress Dorothy. The "Matchless Orinda" was one of her correspondents, but only one letter arising out of this friendship has been preserved. It may justly be quoted entire because it serves to unite the two most interesting women of the time, and because it shows how Mrs. Philips, in the plentitude of her fame, with Dublin dramatic triumphs fresh upon her, with the aristocracy of London adding leaves to her laurel crown, courted the quiet Mrs. Temple living the most retired and domestic of lives at Sheen. This letter has the further pathetic interest of being one of the last Orinda wrote, for when she reached London on this visit she had so longed for she fell a victim to that most dreaded scourge, the small-pox: