Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A perfect triumph.' That evening she dined at Forster's, where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They drank Carlyle's health, and to her it was 'a good joy.' It was Carlyle's intention to have returned at once to London, but he changed his mind, and went for a few quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the rectorial address from him, and was made perfectly happy about it. Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs Carlyle, and for Saturday, April 21st, she had arranged a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote her daily letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in her brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with her. When near Victoria Gate, Hyde Park, she put the dog out to run. 'A passing carriage,' says Froude, 'went over its foot.... She sprang out, caught the dog in her arms, took it with her into the brougham, and was never more seen alive. The coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and round again. Coming a second time near to the Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, he turned round, saw indistinctly that something was wrong, and asked a gentleman near to look into the carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take the lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards distant. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap _dead_.'[34] At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 'green solitudes and fresh spring breezes' of Annandale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, broke the news to him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday, and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It had a kind of _stunning_ effect upon me. Not for above two days could I estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, "My poor little woman!" but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it ever? A stony "Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35]