Lady Augusta Bruce (afterwards Lady Augusta Stanley) had been one of the Duchess’s ladies-in-waiting, and had been almost a daughter to her in love, and more than her own daughter could be in tender, watchful service. The Queen now transferred Lady Augusta to her own household, nominally as Resident Bed-Chamber Woman, really as assistant secretary; and from this time a very strong bond of affection was established between them, which was unbroken until Lady Augusta’s death. The Queen also received help and consolation from the presence of her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who hurried to her parents on hearing of their loss. But notwithstanding all consolations, the Queen’s heart was very sore, and her faithful, tender nature is one which clings with tenacious gratitude to the memory of precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Eleven years after her mother’s death, Her Majesty’s journal for the 17th August, 1872, has the following entry: “Beloved mamma’s birthday. That dear mother, so loving and tender and full of kindness! How often I long for that love!” The Queen did not attend her mother’s funeral. “I and my girls,” she wrote, “prayed at home.” A special trial belonging to the position of Royalty must be its isolation. No subject can be on terms of equality with a Sovereign; crowned heads are therefore thrown almost wholly on their own immediate families for that life-giving sympathy and criticism which can hardly exist in perfection except between equals. To the Queen the loss of her mother, followed by the loss of her husband, brought the silencing of the only voices in the world who could say to her, in love, “You have been wrong, you have made a mistake.” Consider what it must be never to hear any language except that of homage and respect, never to listen to plain truths put plainly, never to be laughed at, seldom to be laughed with; and then imagine what it must be to lose the few who belong to that close inner circle for whom these formalities are non-existent.[30] One can only compare it to the position of a man on a desert island, who, having possessed a Bible or a Shakespeare, wakes one morning to find them destroyed or carried away by the tide. It has been sometimes said by English women that the Queen’s loss when she lost her husband was not greater than that of thousands and millions of women among her subjects; it has even been said that Her Majesty’s loss was not so great: some women, at one blow, by the death of their husbands, are face to face with the wolf of poverty and hunger for themselves and their children. No one can think lightly of such anguish; but if the inner history of such lives could be told, would it not often be found that the curse was turned into a blessing, that the necessity to seek active work, the friends found in seeking it and in doing it, gave relief to the heartache, and that the rod of chastisement had been converted into the staff of strength?