The morning found him up and seated in his sitting-room as before. But he was worse, and talked with a certain incoherence when he told the Queen that he had been listening to the little birds, and they had reminded him of those he had heard at the Rosenau in his childhood. She felt a quick recoil, and when the doctors showed that their favourable opinion of the day before had undergone a change, she went to her room and it seemed to her as if her heart would break. Fever had now declared itself unmistakably. The fact was gently broken to the Queen, and she was warned that the illness must run its course, while the knowledge of its nature was to be kept from the Prince. She called to mind every thought that could give her courage; and Princess Alice, her father's true daughter, capable of rising to heights of duty and tenderness the moment she was put to the test, grew brave in her loving demotion, and already afforded the support which the husband and father was no longer fit to give. Happily for her Majesty, the daily duties of her position as a sovereign, which she could not lay aside though they were no longer shared by the friend of more than twenty years, still occupied a considerable portion of her time. But she wrote in her diary that in fulfilling her task she seemed to live "in a dreadful dream." Do we not also know, many of us, this cruel double life in which the obligations which belong to our circumstances and to old habits contend for mastery with new misery? When she was not thus engaged the Queen sat by her husband, weeping when she could do so unseen. On the 8th of December the Prince appeared to be going on well, though the desire for change continued strong in him, and he was removed at his earnest request to larger and brighter rooms, adjoining those he had hitherto occupied. According to Lady Bloomfield one of the rooms-- certainly called "the Kings' rooms"--into which the Prince was carried, was that in which both William IV. and George IV. had died; and the fact was remembered and referred to by the new tenant, when he was placed where he too was destined to die. The Queen had only once slept there, when her own rooms were being painted, and as it happened, that single occasion was on the night before the day when the Duchess of Kent had her last fatal seizure. The Prince was pleased with the greater space and light and with the winter sunshine. For the first time since his illness he asked for music, "a fine chorale." A piano was brought into the room, and his daughter played two hymns--one of them "_Ein fester burg ist unser Gott_" to which he listened with tears in his eyes. It was Sunday, and Charles Kingsley preached at the Castle. The Queen was present, but she noted sadly that she did not hear a word.