When his first grief was stilled, the King went to Fritz and Willy in the garden. Plucking a branch on which grew three roses, he returned with the little princes to the Queen. The three kissed her, and the King laid the roses in her hand as the second carriage dashed up to the palace.

Charlotte and Carl had come too late. Their mother had been dead a half hour. The old Countess was all they had now, and she hushed her sobs to comfort the King and her Queen's poor children, but, poor old lady, her heart was broken at eighty and she lived only a few years more.

The doctors who examined the body of Queen Louisa after death declared that a polypus, formed by grief and worry, had grown on her heart and killed her, but the people of Prussia would have none of this.

"A polypus, nein," they said. "It is Napoleon who has done this. We will rise. We will drive the tyrant from our land, for he has killed the best friend of Prussia."

"The ravens, Bettina," said the Herr Lieutenant, "will fly now from KyffhÄuser. Wait, old Barbarossa will wake now and save us."

But the peasants had another hero.

"Shill is not dead!" they cried. "The brave Shill is not dead. He, too, loved our Queen. He is in hiding and will lead us against Napoleon."

"It is as if we had lost a member of our own family," wept Madame von Stork, as she tried to comfort poor Marianne.

When they brought the Queen's body to Berlin and it lay in state, Bettina went, with the girls of the "Luisenstift" to look for the last time on the face of the Queen who had cared for her. The Berliners who gazed also, thought their own thoughts, made up their minds, and went home to await the funeral, which took place on the thirtieth, the Royal children with their father following the coffin, a nurse bearing in her arms the new baby, little Albrecht.

"After Jena," said the Berliners, "we thought we had lost all, but then we had our Queen."

Not even the Queen's death, however, moved Napoleon, who, having Prussia under his thumb, meant to keep her there. Realising this, many patriotic Germans, refusing to accept French rule, departed to St. Petersburg. Among them was Baron von Stein, for the Czar, who was beginning to tire of his friend Napoleon, invited him to be his counsellor. After his departure Professor von Stork received a letter from Otto.

"Napoleon rules Prussia," he wrote. "If I return home I must fight as he orders, for we fear a war with Russia. In St. Petersburg Baron von Stein is forming a German legion of deserters from Prussia. I shall join it. Never will I fight under the banners of France. Arndt is in St. Petersburg, also, and will be Stein's secretary. Between them and with Hardenburg as Minister, Prussia may yet be saved. Until then, Auf wiedersehen."

On the very day that this letter arrived, Berlin was startled by the news that Napoleon with his soldiers was to march against Alexander.