Toward her husband Theodosia’s demonstrations of affection were eloquent. During their engagement she wrote him with all the girlish enthusiasm of her seventeen years: “Where you are, there is my country, and in you are centered all my wishes.” And again, on an occasion when they were separated from each other: “Every moment I feel that I have lost so much of your society which can never be regained.” The birth of little Aaron left the mother weak and subject to physical disorders that she was never entirely to be free of. For a time she despaired of her life and in one of her melancholy moods she wrote Alston: “Death is not welcome. I confess it is ever dreaded. You have made me too fond of life. Adieu, then, thou kind, thou tender husband. Adieu! friend of my heart. May Heaven prosper you and may we meet hereafter.” In the fateful summer of 1806 when Colonel Burr departed from the East “never to return,” he was joined in the western country by the Alstons--Theodosia, Joseph, and little Aaron. The Alstons were for a time guests of the Blennerhassetts on their island in the Ohio River. There Theodosia won the undying affection of Margaret Blennerhassett and the admiration of her husband Harman. Although the Alstons were not present at the time of the alleged “overt act,” their visit a short time before served to increase the public’s suspicion of Alston’s implication in the plot. His name, it will be recalled, was mentioned in Burr’s letter to Wilkinson of July 29. The circumstance caused Alston intense embarrassment. He had become accustomed to the annoyance of receiving requests for loans from his father-in-law, but that was a small matter compared with the Colonel’s use of his name in so damaging a document as the cipher letter to Wilkinson. In his perplexity Alston unburdened himself in a letter to his friend Charles Pinckney, then Governor of South Carolina. “I have,” he said, “received and read the President’s message with deep mortification and concern; but the letter annexed to it, stated to be a communication in cypher from Col. Burr to Gen. Wilkinson, exacted my unfeigned astonishment. “I solemnly avow that, when that letter was written, I had never heard, directly or indirectly from Col. Burr or any other person, of the meditated attack on that place, or any other part of the United States, than I have at this moment to suspect that our militia will be forthwith ordered on an expedition against Gibraltar. On the other hand, I had long had strong grounds for believing that Col. Burr was engaged by other objects, of a very different nature from those attributed to him, and which I confess the best sentiments of my heart approved. I need not add that those objects involved not the interests of my country.