After this sad interlude Romilly returned to Cambridge on Monday 13 February, leaving ‘M & L both tolerably well for them’. En route he dined at the Salisbury Chophouse, ‘feeling it painful to dine at the Belle Savage’, where he had so often been with Cuthbert. When he reached Cambridge in the evening Lodge was ‘kindly there’ to meet him, but said that ‘he had on Saturday fallen down in a fit & that they had taken a great deal of blood from him’.

The Diarist at once began house-hunting and looking for servants; eventually, in March, after another ten days at Dulwich on family business, he made an agreement to take a house in the Hills Road.

During this term, which was ‘dismissed’ on 17 March, Romilly's entries are brief, bald records of his Registry business, correspondence and walks, including one to Dry Drayton on which, on the way back, he ‘got sopped thro’ trousers & drawers’.