With the passing of the Queen Mother, Britons wonder if they will ever see her like again, writes Frank Millar, London Editor.
The "Queen Mum" is dead. On the first day of summertime, death casts its grey pallor across Britain - a country still defined by its wartime experience, the defiant and resilient tale of which she came to epitomise.
And as they celebrate her life, and mourn her loss, Britons across the generations will wonder if they might ever see her like again.
They may wonder, too, what the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother might foretell for a House of Windsor no longer granted automatic deference, its immediate security tied intimately to the sole successor of the original "gang of four".
The Queen Mother died just seven weeks after she was shockingly pre-deceased by her youngest daughter, Princess Margaret, and watched her buried 50 years to the day after the burial of her husband, his late Majesty King George VI.
When world war two was declared on September 3rd, 1939, it was formally suggested that three of the original members of this royal "firm" - the Queen and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose - should be evacuated to the safety of Canada for the duration.
To this the Queen issued her famous reply: "The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. And the King will never leave."
Death has taken them now - the Queen's beloved father, sister and mother - and the unimaginable loneliness of Queen Elizabeth II may strike some as metaphor, too, for potentially uncertain times again ahead for the House of Windsor.
There can be no doubting the popular affection for the queen, like her mother a model of unstinting and loyal service.
The rehabilitation of Prince Charles continues apace after the trauma of his divorce from "the peoples' princess" Diana.
However, the question of marriage to Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles and her possible future role remains unresolved, while some clearly hope Prince William might ultimately bring the whole business of royalty to an end by refusing to succeed his father.
Even leaving such speculations aside, it would be natural - given the Queen Mother's centrality to the life of the nation for close on 80 years - that people might wonder if things could ever be the same again.
Her niece, the Hon Margaret Rhodes, voiced the question aloud on Saturday evening, just hours after she and Queen Elizabeth had watched the royal matriarch's life finally ebb away at Royal Lodge, Windsor, at 3.15 p.m.
"It was a wonderful life spanning more than 100 years," she told the BBC.
"She was a wonderful, wonderful person to know. Someone that we will almost never see the like of again."
Republicans may retch at such sentiment. Revisionists, certainly, are on stand-by, ready to revisit the reputation of the "pearly queen" whose velvet glove contained a fist of iron - and whose steely determination so dramatically restored and re-shaped the institution of monarchy following the abdication crisis of 1936.
At this writing, however, commoners and courtiers alike are united in their regretful sense of an important chapter of British history now closed.
Her lifelong friend, Lord St John of Fawsley, captured the mood with simplicity and elegance: "With her passing we have lost our most treasured national person. She was not merely an historical figure, she was history. She spanned all the years of the 20th century. And at our darkest hour of all time, in 1940, she helped turn it into our finest." Coolly considered, these words of tribute are truly humbling.
The abdication and the war may have been the defining episodes in a life originally set for obscurity on the outer fringes of royalty. But this was the life of a century.
When the Hon Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was born in the last year of Queen Victoria's reign, the Labour Party was but five months old, Mafeking had just been relieved, the British were winning the Boer War and the Empire was still expanding.
And this remarkable woman, who would help secure the Windsor dynasty and the reigns of two monarchs, would live through the Great War, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany; witness the rise and fall of apartheid in South Africa and the restoration of monarchy after Franco's dictatorship; follow the fortunes of 18 American presidents; and quietly admire the long leadership of Margaret Thatcher after a childhood in which no woman had voted for, let alone been elected to, the House of Commons.
Long before the age of celebrity, she was also a star - a woman who conducted herself with extraordinary grace, who brought to monarchy a lightness of touch with no consequent loss of majesty.
She became, as the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has said, the symbol of Britain's "decency and courage".
And, as Iain Duncan Smith suggested, she represented "the best of us all" - at any rate, as we might like to be.