Prince Leopold had come to Sidmouth a day or two earlier, and he went with the Duchess and the Princess to London. The villagers gathered about the carriage to bid a silent farewell to the sorrowful company. Many of them were weeping and their tears flowed still faster when the nurse held the baby up to the carriage window and whispered, "Say good-by to the people;" for the little one waved her hand and patted the glass and sprang up and down in her nurse's arms without the least realization of her loss.
The carriage rolled away, but the people stood watching it until it was out of sight.
"That's the sweetest child in all England," said one woman, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron, "and now the poor little thing will have no father."
"Did ever you see a man so fond of his child as the Duke?" said another with a sob.
"King George had nine sons," said a man who stood near, "and the Duke was every whit the best of them. The King never treated him fairly. When the others wanted money, they had it; but when the Duke needed it, his father just said, 'Get along as you can.' There wasn't one of the sons that the King wasn't kinder to than to the Duke."
"He'll have little more chance to be kind or unkind," declared another. "Have you not heard the news from London? The King is very ill, and the Prince Regent will soon be George IV."
"It's bad luck speaking ill of him that's to be king," said one, "but the man that's gone to London in his coffin was the man that I'd have liked to see on the throne."
"Will the Duchess go back to her own land, think you?" questioned the first woman.
"Yes, that she will," replied the second positively "There never was a woman that loved her own people better than she. Folks say she writes her mother every day of her life."
"I say she'll not go back," declared one of the men with equal positiveness. "She'll do her duty, and her duty is to care for the Princess. God bless her, and make her our queen some day."
So the people in the village talked, and so people were talking throughout the kingdom. After the first sad days were past the question had to be decided by the Duchess and her devoted brother Leopold. The Duchess loved her family and her old home at Amorbach, near Heidelberg. There she and the Duke had spent the first months of their married life, and nothing would have helped her more to bear her loneliness than a return to the Bavarian Palace, in which every room was associated with memories of him. She was a stranger in England and she could not even speak the language of the country. The Duke's sisters loved her, and Adelaide, who had been a German princess before she became the wife of the Duke of Clarence gave her the warmest sympathy in this time of sorrow; but the Regent disliked her and had always seemed indignant at the possibility that his brother's child would inherit the throne. The Regent had now become king, for his father had died on the very day of the Duchess's return to London. Unless a child was born to either the Duke of York or the Duke of Clarence the baby Princess would become queen at their death. The child who would rule England ought to be brought up in England.