The Queen had gone into the next room to weep there when Sir James Clark sent Princess Alice to bring her back. The end had come. With his wife kneeling by his side and holding his hand, his children kneeling around, the Queen's nephew, Prince Ernest Leiningen, the gentlemen of the Prince's suite, General Bruce, General Grey, and Sir Charles Phipps, the Dean of Windsor, and the Prince's favourite German valet, Lohlein, reverently watching the scene, the true husband and tender father, the wise prince and liberal-hearted statesman, the noble Christian man, gently breathed his last. It was a quarter to eleven o'clock on the 14th of December, 1861. He was aged forty-two years. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE WITHDRAWAL TO OSBORNE--THE PRINCE CONSORT'S FUNERAL. The tolling of the great bell of St. Paul's, borne on the wintry midnight air, thrilled many a heart with grief and dismay, as London was roused to the melancholy fact of the terrible bereavement which had befallen the Queen and the country. To the Prince indeed death had come without terror, even without recoil. Some time before he had told the Queen that he had not her clinging to life, that if he knew it was well with those he cared for, he would be quite ready to die to-morrow. He was perfectly convinced of the future reunion of those who had loved each other on earth, though he did not know under what circumstances it would take place. During one of the happy Highland excursions in 1861, the Prince had remarked to one of the keepers when talking over with him the choice and planting of a deer-forest for the Prince of Wales, "You and I may be dead and gone before that." "He was ever cheerful, but ever ready and prepared," was the Queen's comment on this remark. But for the Queen, "a widow at forty-two!" was the lamenting cry of the nation which had been so proud of its young Queen, of her love- match, of her happiness as a wife. Now a subtler touch than any which had gone before won all hearts to her, and bowed them before her feet in a very passion of love and loyalty. It was her share in the common birthright of sorrow, with the knowledge that she in whose joy so many had rejoiced was now qualified by piteous human experience to weep with those who wept--that thenceforth throughout her wide dominions every mourner might feel that their Queen mourned with them as only a fellow-sufferer can mourn. [Footnote: "The Queen wrote my mother, Lady Normanby, such a beautiful letter after Normanby's death, saying that having drunk the dregs of her cup of grief herself, she knew how to sympathise with others."--LADY BLOOMFIELD.] All hearts went out to her in the day of her bitter sorrow. Prayers innumerable were put up for her, and she believed they sustained her when she would otherwise have sunk under the heavy burden.