For terrible indeed it was.

As the years passed her depression seemed to deepen and her loneliness to grow more intense.

"I am on a dreary sad pinnacle of solitary grandeur," she said.

Again and again she felt that she could bear her situation no longer--that she would sink under the strain.

And then, instantly, that Voice spoke: and she braced herself once more to perform, with minute conscientiousness, her grim and holy task.
Above all else, what she had to do was to make her own the master-impulse of Albert's life--she must work, as he had worked, in the service of the country.