For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company! And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to _Helbeck_ a striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, admired the book and would like to see the writer of it. A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in 1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's" implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows: The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March, 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared, announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether her Majesty would receive him. "Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!"