It will easily be believed that during the rest of that dreary winter none of Peter Tone’s household—except perhaps Baby Maria—slept sound o’ nights. “I slept,” says Theobald, “continually with a case of pistols at my pillow, and a mouse could not stir that I was not on my feet and through the house from top to bottom. If any one knocked at the door after nightfall we flew to our arms, and in this manner, we kept a most painful garrison through the winter.” Fear of external enemies was not the only trouble the little garrison suffered. Within there was an ever-growing poverty, an ever increasing load of financial troubles. Theobald could bear no longer to be a useless “mouth” in the hunger-besieged citadel of his father’s home—and so he scraped together in some way a little money and went off to London to keep his terms as a law student of the Middle Temple. During the period of his absence in London (January, 1787, to December, 1788) Matilda Tone and her little girl remained with her father-in-law in Clane. Her husband tells us that she and little Maria were treated by his father with great affection. But the situation was very painful. Old Peter Tone’s affairs grew every day more involved, and the letters she got from her husband in London brought little comfort. She knew how he hated Law, and how unwillingly he drudged at the study of it. If, as was his habit in later years, he made her at this period the _confidante_ of all his schemes and dreams, it is certain that she must have had many an anxious moment at the prospects they presented to her. Now it was a project for establishing a colony on a military plan, in one of Captain Cook’s newly-discovered islands in the South Sea. Fascinating as Captain Cook’s description of these islands might be, it was not to be expected that a young mother of eighteen could picture herself and her little one exiled to one of them from the fair hills of Ireland without dismay. But at least if that project materialised she should have her husband with her. Not so with the second project—conceived in a fit of black despondency when everything else seemed hopeless. It was to “list” as a soldier in the East India Company’s service: “to quit Europe for ever, and to leave my wife and child to the mercy of her family who might, I hoped, be kinder to her when I was removed.”[55] Brave as Matilda Tone was, it is not surprising to learn that her health broke down under the strain of her anxieties. Footnote 55: “Autobiography,” p. 19. At length a friend, touched by the hapless condition of the young pair, made intercession for them with old Mr. Fanning. The grandfather was induced to give Matilda £500 of the dower he had promised her—and on the strength of this advance, Theobald returned to Ireland.