A few months earlier, on the death of the King of Prussia, the Prince Consort had written to his daughter that her experience exceeded his, for he had never seen any person die. The Queen had been equally unacquainted with the mournful knowledge which comes to most even before they have attained mature manhood and womanhood. Now the loving daughter knelt or stood by the mother who was leaving her without a sign, or lay painfully listening to the homely trivial sounds which broke the stillness of the night--the crowing of a cock, the dogs barking in the distance; the striking of the old repeater which had belonged to the Queen's father, that she had heard every night in her childhood, but to which she had not listened for twenty-three years-- the whole of her full happy married life. She wondered with the vague piteous wonder--natural in such a case--what her mother, would have thought of her passing a night under her roof again, and she not to know it? In the March morning the Prince took the Queen from the room in which she could not rest, yet from which she could not remain absent. When she returned windows and doors were thrown open. The Queen sat down on a footstool and held the Duchess's hand, while the paleness of death stole over the face, and the features grew longer and sharper. "I fell on my knees," her Majesty wrote afterwards, "holding the beloved hand which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my heart would break.... It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten scene. Fainter and fainter grew the breathing; at last it ceased, but there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed as they had been for the last half-hour.... The clock struck half-past nine at the very moment. Convulsed with sobs I fell on the hand and covered it with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room, himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over; he said, "Yes." I went into the room again after a few minutes and gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had done before, but was already white. Oh, God! how awful, how mysterious! But what a blessed end. Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over." By the Prince's advice the Queen went at once to the late Duchess's sitting-room, where it was hard to bear the unchanged look of everything, "Chairs, cushions ... all on the tables, her very work- basket with her work; the little canary bird which she was so fond of, singing!"