In the course of the same year the Queen's second daughter, Princess Alice, afterwards the friend and companion of her mother's first days of widowhood, was betrothed to Prince Louis of Hesse. In February 1861, the Queen and the Prince-Consort kept the twenty-first anniversary of their wedding-day--'a day which has brought us,' says the Queen, 'and I may say, to the world at large, such incalculable blessings. Very few can say with me,' she adds, 'that their husband at the end of twenty-one years is not only full of the friendship, kindness, and affection which a truly happy marriage brings with it, but of the same tender love as in the very first days of our marriage.' The Prince-Consort wrote to the aged Duchess of Kent, 'You have, I trust, found good and loving children in us, and we have experienced nothing but love and kindness from you.' Alas! it was the death of that beloved mother which was to cast the first of the many shadows which have since fallen upon the royal home. The duchess died, after a slight illness, rather suddenly at last, the Queen and the prince reaching her side too late for any recognition. It was a terrible blow to the Queen: she wrote to her uncle Leopold that she felt 'truly orphaned.' Her sister, the Princess Hohenlohe, daughter of the Duchess of Kent by her first marriage, could not come to England at the time, but wrote letters full of sympathy and inspiration; yet Her Majesty became very nervous, and was inclined to shrink into solitude, even from her children, and to find comfort nowhere but with the beloved consort who was himself so soon to be taken from her. The great blow which made the royal lady a widow, and deprived the whole country of the throne's wisest and most disinterested counsellor, came on the 14th of December 1861.