Though Burr was acquitted, there was an element of hostility to him in the government, and much distrust of him among the people of the country at large. In the following year, therefore, he went to Europe. Theodosia had gone to New York to be near him. He saw her for the last time on June 7, 1808, the night before he sailed. She spent that summer at Saratoga, and the following winter in New York, where she lived in retirement. "The world," she said, in one of her letters to her father about this time, "begins to cool terribly around me. You would be surprised how many I supposed attached to me have abandoned the sorry losing game of disinterested friendship." She repeatedly urged him to return, promising him that if the worst came to the worst, she would leave everything and suffer with him. A few months after Madison's elevation to the Presidency she wrote to Mrs. Madison, whom her father had known when she was a young widow, and to whom he had introduced Mr. Madison. "Ever since the choice of the people was first declared in favor of Mr. Madison, my heart, amid the universal joy, has beat with the hope that I, too, should soon have reason to rejoice," she wrote. She desired to know if there was danger of any further prosecution of her father in the event of his return. For the same purpose she wrote two years later from the Oaks, her South Carolina home, to Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury, and once a friend of her father's. The letter was calmly logical, yet eloquent with feeling. In another year Burr was within sight of his home and country. As he neared her shores he wrote in his journal, "A pilot is in sight and within two miles of us. All is bustle and joy except Gamp [the name by which his little grandson called him]. Why should he rejoice?" Of all the misfortunes of his life, the heaviest were to fall upon him that year. A month after her father's arrival in New York, and while her heart was yet rejoicing that he had been kindly received, the young life of Theodosia's son, full of beauty and promise, closed. "I will not conceal from you," wrote Alston to his father-in-law, "that life is a burden, which, heavy as it is, we shall support, if not with dignity, at least with decency and firmness. Theodosia has endured all that a human being could endure, but her admirable mind will triumph. She supports herself in a manner worthy of your daughter."