He accompanied the Princess on the piano, and he drew with and for her. It was a happy, busy time, though some of the late dinners, at which, the Prince drank only water, were doubtless dull enough of the young people, and Prince Albert, accustomed to the early hours and simple habits of Germany, felt the change trying. He confessed that it was sometimes with the greatest difficulty he could keep awake. The Princess's birthday came round during her kinsman's visit. The Prince alluded to the event and to his stay at Kensington in writing to the Duchess of Kent three years later, when he was the proud and happy bridegroom of his cousin. He made no note of the date as having had an effect on their relations to each other, neither did he dwell on any good wish or gift [Footnote: Lady Bloomfield mentions among the Queen's rings "a small enamel with a tiny diamond in the centre, the Prince's gift when he first came to England, a lad of seventeen."] on his part; but in compliance with a motherly request from his aunt, the Duchess, that he would send her something he had worn, he returned to her a ring that she had given him on that May morning. The ring had never left his finger since then. The very shape proclaimed that it had been squeezed in the grasp of many a manly hand. The ring had her name upon it, but the name was "Victoria" too, and he begged her to wear it in remembrance of his bride and himself. The favourable impression had been made in spite of the perversity of fortune and the vagaries of human hearts, which, amidst other casualties, might have led the Princess to accord her preference to the elder brother, Prince Ernest, who was also "a fine young fellow," though not so well suited to become prince-consort to the Queen of England. But for once destiny was propitious, and neither that nor any other mischance befell the bright prospects of the principal actors in the scene. When the King of the Belgians could no longer refrain from expressing his hopes, he had the most satisfactory answer from his royal niece. "I have only now to beg you, my dearest uncle," she wrote, "to take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection. I hope and trust that all will now go on prosperously and well on this subject, now of so much importance to me." At the same time, though an affectionate correspondence was started and maintained for a year, no further communication passed which could tend to enlighten the Prince as to the feelings he had excited. He went away to complete his education, to study diligently, along with his brother, at Brussels and Bonn; to feel in full the gladness of opening life and opening powers of no ordinary description; to rejoice, as few young men have the same warrant to rejoice, in the days of his unstained, noble youth.