With Alexander's dramatic accession to his full Kingship a new, if brief, era of happiness opened to Natalie. The Regents were no longer able to exclude her from Servia, and by her son's invitation she returned to Belgrade to resume her old position of Queen. Still beautiful, in spite of all her suffering, she played for a time the rôle of Queen-mother to perfection, holding her Courts, presiding at balls and soirées, taking a prominent part in affairs of State, and gradually acquiring more power than her easy-going son himself enjoyed. At last, after long years of unrest and unhappiness, she seemed assured of peaceful years, secure in the affection of her son and her people, and far removed from the husband who had brought so much misery into her life. But Natalie was fated never to be happy long, and once more her evil Destiny was to snatch the cup from her lips, assuming this time the form of Draga Maschin, one of her own ladies-in-waiting, under the spell of whose black eyes and voluptuous charms her son quickly fell, after that first dramatic incident at Biarritz, when she plunged into the sea to his rescue and saved him from drowning. Many months earlier a clairvoyante at Paris had told Natalie, "Your Majesty is cherishing in your bosom a poisonous snake, which one day will give you a mortal wound." She had smiled incredulously at the warning, but she was soon to learn what truth it held. Certainly Draga Maschin was the last person she would have suspected of being a source of danger--a woman many years older than her son, the penniless widow of a drunken engineer--a woman, moreover, of whose life, before Natalie had taken pity on her poverty, many strange stories were told--how, for instance, she had often been seen in low resorts, "with the arm of a forester or a tradesman round her, singing the old Servian songs." But she had not taken into account Draga's sensuous beauty, before which her son was powerless. Each meeting left him more and more involved in her toils, until, to the consternation of Servia and the horror of his mother, he announced his intention of making her his Queen. Even Milan, degraded as he was, was horror-struck when the news came to him in Paris. "And this," he exclaimed, "is the act of 'Sacha'--my own son. He is a monster, a thing of evil in the eyes of all men! The Maschin will be Queen of Servia. What a reproach! What an evil! A creature like her! A sordid creature! Could he not have put aside his love for this low-born woman? But I could never make the fool understand that a King has duties; he has something else to think of but love-making."