The Prince avowed his engagement to his grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, in these words: “The Queen sent for me alone to her room a few days ago, and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart, and would make her intensely happy if I would make the sacrifice of sharing her life with her, for she said she looked on it as a sacrifice; the only thing that troubled her was that she did not think she was worthy of me. The joyous openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me, and I was quite carried away by it. She is really most good and amiable, and I am quite sure Heaven has not given me into evil hands, and that we shall be happy together. Since that moment Victoria does whatever she fancies I should wish or like, and we talk together a great deal about our future life, which she promises me to make as happy as possible.” In these letters one feels that her tone is more generous than his. The Queen’s letters, then in the first blush of love, and always wherever her husband is concerned, breathe the spirit of Elsa’s self-dedication, “_Dir geb’ ich Alles, was ich brie!_” She had then, and preserved to the end of their happy life together, unbounded belief in him and pride in him. To her he was the most beautiful, the wisest and best of human beings. He was always to her “my precious Albert,” “my incomparable Albert,” “my beloved Albert, looking so handsome in his uniform.” Sometimes, even in very happy marriages, the King of the fireside has to descend from his throne when the babies arrive; the wife becomes less the wife and more the mother. This was never so in the case of the Queen; her husband was always first and foremost in her heart. She wrote after many years of marriage, during one of the Prince Consort’s short absences from home, “You cannot think how much this costs me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the house and home were gone.” King Leopold had read her rightly, when he wrote immediately after her engagement, that she was one to whom a happy home life was in a special degree indispensable. The cares and anxieties of her political duties made it more necessary for her happiness than even for that of most women, to have her home hallowed by the sympathy, support, advice, and affection of the husband who never ceased to be her lover.