In the midst of this entertainment and display, the tender heart of the Queen was more than once deeply grieved by the death of dear friends. The cherished Feodore, the Princess Hohenlohe, died; then the Queen lost Dr. McLeod, the Scotch clergyman who had so helped and comforted her in her troubles. Hardly two months had passed after his death before heart-broken letters came from Darmstadt. Princess Alice had been away for a short time, counting the hours before she could be with her children again. At last she was at home with them and happy. The two little boys were brought to her chamber one morning, and as she stepped for a moment into the adjoining room, one of them, "Frittie," fell from the window to the stone terrace, and died in a few hours. The heart-broken mother longed to go to her own mother for comfort in her trouble, but she could not leave her home, neither could the Queen come to her. Warm, tender words of sympathy came from England, from a Queen mother who well knew what sorrow meant. "Can you bear to play on the piano yet?" she asked some three months after the accident; for it was long after the death of Prince Albert before she herself could endure the sound of music. Princess Alice replied, "It seems as if I never could play again on that piano, where little hands were nearly always thrust when I wanted to play. Ernie asked, 'Why can't we all die together? I don't like to die alone, like Frittie.'" While the heart of the Queen was aching with sympathy for her daughter, she had also to attend to arrangements for the marriage of her sailor son "Affie," now Duke of Edinburgh, with the daughter of the Emperor of Russia. She herself could not go to the wedding at St. Petersburg, but she asked Dean Stanley to go and perform the English ceremony; for as the bride was a member of the Greek Church, there was a double rite. To Dean Stanley's wife she sent a mysterious little parcel containing two sprigs of myrtle, and with it a letter which asked her to put them into warm water, and when the wedding day came, to place them in a bouquet of white flowers for the bride. The myrtle had grown from the slip in the bridal bouquet of the Princess Royal, and in the five marriages of royal children that had preceded this one, each bride had carried a bit of the bush.