Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and took up her abode
at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in Surrey, as companion to an invalid,
Mrs. De Vere. She probably chose this place on account of the Locke
connection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is now much in
her correspondence about Damaris, Lady Masham, and others in that circle
in which George Burnet himself was intimate. But great changes were
imminent. Although her correspondence at this time is copious it is not
always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly edited. Her constant
interchange of letters with George Burnet leaves the real position
between them on many points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he
was dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had left her
£100 in his will, and added: "Pray God I might live to give you much
more myself." He regrets that he had so easily "pulled himself from her
company," and suggests that if she had not left London to settle in
Salisbury he would have stayed in England. Years after they had parted
we find him begging her to continue writing to him "at least once a
week." She, on her part, tells him that he well knows that there is but
one person she could ever think of marrying. He seems to have made her
want of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her,
but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of a
fortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her
by telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "who
might bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing
(Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They write to one another with
extreme formality, but that proves nothing. A young woman, passionately
in love with a man whom she had just accepted as her future husband,
was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by describing herself as
"Sir, your very humble servant."

If George Burnet hinted of "parties" in Hanover, Catharine Trotter on