Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/212

 In a letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, now the last survivor of his generation, the Queen wrote that she felt "so truly orphaned." The Queen was sustained in her sorrow by the tender sympathy of her husband and of her daughter, the Princess Alice, whose strong and beautiful character, already well known in her home circle, was to be revealed to the nation a few months later. The Princess was now entering on womanhood, and had recently been betrothed to Prince Louis of Hesse, nephew of the reigning Grand Duke. After her lamented death in 1878, a volume, with extracts from her letters to the Queen, was published as a memorial. In these she repeatedly recurs to the act that when the Duchess of Kent died, the Prince Consort took his daughter by the hand and led her to the Queen, and told her she "must comfort mamma." A few months later, when the place in the Palace of the husband and father was vacant, the Princess recalled these words, and accepted them as a sacred trust and bequest. She nobly justified the confidence her father had reposed in her. In this earlier bereavement it was her office to comfort and sustain the Queen, who wrote: "Dear, good Alice was full of intense feeling, tenderness, and distress for me; she, and all of them, loved 'grandmamma' so dearly."

The Queen and Prince appreciated fully all that the former had owed to her mother,—the watchful vigilance and wisdom with which, from the date of her husband's death, in 1820, the Duchess had devoted herself to the one object of preparing her baby daughter for the great future which awaited her. Stockmar had been her friend from the hour of her bereavement; it was from him that she learned that the illness of her husband could have no other than a fatal termination; he had stood by her through the long years of