But such painful incidents were rare.  Victoria was growing very old; with no Albert to guide her, with no Beaconsfield to enflame her, she was willing enough to abandon the dangerous questions of diplomacy to the wisdom of Lord Salisbury, and to concentrate her energies upon objects which touched her more nearly and over which she could exercise an undisputed control.  Her home—­her court—­the monuments at Balmoral—­the livestock at Windsor—­the organisation of her engagements—­the supervision of the multitudinous details of her daily routine—­such matters played now an even greater part in her existence than before.  Her life passed in an extraordinary exactitude.  Every moment of her day was mapped out beforehand; the succession of her engagements was immutably fixed; the dates of her journeys—­to Osborne, to Balmoral, to the South of France, to Windsor, to London—­were hardly altered from year to year.  She demanded from those who surrounded her a rigid precision in details, and she was preternaturally quick in detecting the slightest deviation from the rules which she had laid down.  Such was the irresistible potency of her personality, that anything but the most implicit obedience to her wishes was felt to be impossible; but sometimes somebody was unpunctual; and unpunctuality was one of the most heinous of sins.  Then her displeasure—­her dreadful displeasure—­became all too visible.  At such moments there seemed nothing surprising in her having been the daughter of a martinet.

But these storms, unnerving as they were while they lasted, were quickly over, and they grew more and more exceptional.  With the return of happiness a gentle benignity flowed from the aged Queen.  Her smile, once so rare a visitant to those saddened features, flitted over them with an easy alacrity; the blue eyes beamed; the whole face, starting suddenly from its pendulous expressionlessness, brightened and softened and cast over those who watched it an unforgettable charm.  For in her last years there was a fascination in Victoria’s amiability which had been lacking even from the vivid impulse of her youth.  Over all who approached her—­or very nearly all—­she threw a peculiar spell.  Her grandchildren adored her; her ladies waited upon her with a reverential love.  The honour of serving her obliterated a thousand inconveniences—­the monotony of a court existence, the fatigue of standing, the necessity for a superhuman attentiveness to the minutia:  of time and space.  As one did one’s wonderful duty one could forget that one’s legs were aching from the infinitude of the passages at Windsor, or that one’s bare arms were turning blue in the Balmoral cold.