The death took place at Windsor, at a little after two o'clock in the morning. Immediately afterwards the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley, and the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquis of Conyngham, together with the Earl of Albemarle, the Master of the Horse, and Sir Henry Halford, the late King's physician, started from Windsor for Kensington. All through the rest of the summer night these solemn and stately gentlemen drove, nodding with fatigue, hailing the early dawn, speaking at intervals to pronounce sentence on the past reign and utter prognostications, of the reign which was to come. Shortly before five, when the birds were already in full chorus in Kensington Gardens, the party stood at the main door, demanding admission. This was another and ruder summons than the musical serenade which had been planned to wile the gentle sleeper sweetly from her slumbers and to hail her natal day not a month before. That had been a graceful, sentimental recognition of a glad event; this was an unvarnished, well-nigh stern arousal to the world of grave business and anxious care, following the mournful announcement of a death--not a birth. From this day the Queen's heavy responsibilities and stringent obligations were to begin. That untimely, peremptory challenge sounded the first knell to the light heart and careless freedom of youth. Though it had been well known that the King lay on his death-bed, and Kensington without, as well as Kensington within, must have been in a high state of expectation, it does not appear that there were any watchers on the alert to rush together at the roll of the three royal carriages. Instead of the eager, respectful crowd, hurrying into the early-opened gates of the park to secure good places for all that was to be seen and heard on the day of the Princess's coming of age, Palace Green seems to have been a solitude on this momentous June morning, and the individual the most interested in the event, after the new-made Queen, instead of being there to pay his homage first, as he had offered his congratulations on the birthday a year before, was far away, quietly studying at the little university town on the Rhine.