In the autumn of 1863 she went with her aunt, the Grand Duchess Helena of Russia, to Ouchy, on the Lake of Geneva, and for the winter to St. Petersburg. On the way to the latter place she saw her father for the last time at Wiesbaden. He did not expect ever to see his daughter again. Everybody was charmed with her at the Russian Court. She did not feel at ease, however, amid the grandeur which surrounded her. Her imagination was excited by all that she saw and heard, but her nerves suffered. The Grand Duchess sought to calm her mind by varied but regular occupation. The day was filled with music, reading, study of the Russian language, etc. Rubinstein first, and afterwards Clara Schumann, taught her music. When she expected Rubinstein to come, her excitement was so great that it almost took away her breath. She regarded him with such veneration that she lost all heart, from a sense of her own little talent. The climate and nervous excitement brought on gastric fever. For weeks she was confined to bed. It was her first illness. She had never tasted medicine before she was twenty. She could hardly believe, therefore, that she was really ill. As soon as she was able to do so, she buried herself in a philosophical work by her father, a copy of which he had sent her, and wrote to him telling him the pleasure it gave her. She enjoyed the seclusion from the gaieties that were going on. “It is very strange,” she wrote to her father; “yesterday I read ninety pages of philosophy, and was so rested that everyone was astonished at my looking so well. But if only two or three ladies come, and tell me the gossip of the town, and of all the things that are going on, it makes me droop like a withered leaf.” When she was well enough she resumed her social intercourse with the Grand Duchess, but had a sudden relapse. It was an anxious time for her mother: her husband dangerously ill, her daughter invalided at a distance, and she not there to nurse her! “I know she is in God’s hands,” she wrote, “and under the care of faithful and loving friends, but that does not take the pain, the load of sorrow, from my heart.” The Princess Elizabeth was able to venture into the open air again at the beginning of March. It seemed as if her recovery would be rapid. A few days later, however, she received the tidings of her father’s death. She loved her father with enthusiastic tenderness. She owed her intellectual development, for the most part, to him. Her grief was heightened by the thought that she had not been with him in his last days. But no murmur escaped her lips. She bore the blow with such composure and resignation that everyone about her was deeply impressed and touched. She sought to comfort and strengthen her mother. “We shall fill the desolate void with our love,” she wrote, “and therein find our happiness.” She regarded her father as a shining example, and sought to think and act according to his ideas. In the judgments she formed,