In March the Duchess underwent a surgical operation for a complaint affecting her right arm and rendering it useless, so that the habits of many years had to be laid aside, and she could no longer without difficulty work, or write, or play on the piano, of which her musical talent and taste had made her particularly fond. The Queen and the Prince visited the Duchess at Frogmore on the 12th of March, and found her in a suffering but apparently not a dangerous condition. On the 15th good news, including the medical men's report and a letter from Lady Augusta Bruce, the Duchess of Kent's attached lady-in- waiting, came from Frogmore to Buckingham Palace, and the Queen and the Prince went without any apprehension on a visit to the gardens of the Horticultural Society at Kensington. Her Majesty returned alone, leaving the Prince to transact some business. She was "resting quite happily" in her arm-chair, when the Prince arrived with a message from Sir James Clark that the Duchess had been seized with a shivering fit-- a bad symptom, from which serious consequences were apprehended. In two hours the Queen, the Prince, and Princess Alice were at Frogmore. "Just the same," was the sorrowful answer given by the ladies and gentlemen awaiting them. The Prince Consort went up to the Duchess's room and came back with tears in his eyes; then the Queen knew what to expect. With a trembling heart she followed her husband and entered the bedroom. There "on a sofa, supported by cushions, the room much darkened," sat the Duchess, "leaning back, breathing heavily in her silk dressing- gown, with her cap on, looking quite herself" For a second the sight of the dear familiar figure, so little changed, must have afforded a brief reprieve, and lent a sense of almost glad incredulity to the distress which had gone before. But the well-meant whisper of one of the attendants of "_Ein sanftes ende_" destroyed the passing illusion. "Seeing that my presence did not disturb her," the Queen wrote afterwards, "I knelt before her, kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the dreadful reality was before me that for the first time she did not know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went out to sob.... I asked the doctors if there was no hope; they said they feared none whatever, for consciousness had left her.... It was suffusion of water on the chest which had come on." The long night passed in sad watching by the unconscious sufferer, and in vain attempts at rest in preparation for the greater sorrow that was in store.