May--when he seems to have entreated her to be reconciled to him--till
July, when she, in her turn, becoming anxious at a four days'
cessation of news, wrote an imploring letter to Hookham, the Bond
Street bookseller, for information about her husband.

In the meantime, what had been passing in Godwin's house? The
Philosopher, whom Shelley loved and revered, was becoming inextricably
involved in money matters. What was needed but this to draw still
closer the sympathies of the poet, who had not been exempt from like
straits? He was thus in the anomalous position of an heir to twenty
thousand a year, who could wish to raise three thousand pounds on his
future expectations, not for discreditable gambling debts, or worse
extravagances, but to save his beloved master and his family from dire
distress.

What a coil of circumstances to be entangling all concerned! Mary
returning from the delights of her Scottish home to find her father,
whom she always devotedly loved, on the verge of bankruptcy, with all
the hopeless vista which her emotional and highly imaginative nature
could conjure up; and then to find this dreaded state of distress
relieved, and by her hero--the poet who, for more than two years, "all
the women of her family had been profoundly interested in."

And for Shelley, the contrast from the desolate home, where sulks and
ill-humour assailed him, and which, for a time, was a deserted home
for him; where facts, or his fitful imagination, ran riot with his
honour, to the home where all showed its roseate side for him; where
all vied to please the young benefactor, who was the humble pupil of
its master; where Mary, in the expanding glow of youth and intellect,
could talk on equal terms with the enthusiastic poet.