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I was about eleven years of age when it happened. And it came like a bomb. I had not thought of it. I was expecting that, when I finished school, I should have a life like other girls; and I was bewildered when my mother summoned us to her room one morning and told us that my brother Alfonso had been proclaimed King of Spain. I could see from her manner that it was to her a happy event that would make a great difference to us, but I did not realise how it would be. It was as if some one should tell a little girl of a great inheritance that was to make her very wealthy, when she did not understand what money could buy.

The first signs of the change came immediately from the nuns at the convent, who treated us more formally than before. And we learned from the girls that they had been told to be different with us, but, of course, they did not succeed. They came to us much excited and curious to know how we felt; and I could see that they were disappointed because we did not feel as delighted as they supposed. Then a great many people began to come to the Palais—Spanish personages, Republicans who had never visited us before, and men who, I learned, had been concerned in my mother’s exile. And it puzzled me to see that she received them all as if they had always been as friendly as they now appeared.