tion. The persons present began to whisper. The queen looked with
angry eyes on the presuming lover. The infanta was evidently annoyed.
Charles hesitated and stopped short. Something seemed to have gone
wrong. The infanta answered his eager words with a few cold,
common-place sentences; a sense of constraint and uneasiness appeared to
haunt the apartment; the interview was at an end. English ideas of
love-making had proved much too unconventional for a Spanish court.

From that day forward the affair dragged on with infinite deliberation,
the passion of the prince growing stronger, the aversion of the infanta
seemingly increasing, the purpose of the Spanish court to mould the
ardent lover to its own ends appearing more decided.

While Charles showed his native disposition by prevarication, Buckingham
showed his by an impatience that soon led to anger and insolence. The
wearisome slowness of the negotiations ill suited his hasty and
arbitrary temper, he quarrelled with members of the State Council, and,
in an interview between the prince and the friars, he grew so incensed
at the demands made that, in disregard of all the decencies of
etiquette, he sprang from his seat, expressed his contempt for the
ecclesiastics by insulting gestures, and ended by flinging his hat on
the ground and stamping on it. That conference came to a sudden end.

As the stay of the prince in Madrid now seemed likely to be protracted,
attendants were sent him from England that he might keep up, some show
of state. But the Spanish court did not want them, and contrived to make
their stay so unpleasant and their accommodations so poor, that Charles
soon packed the most of them off home again.

"I am glad to get away," said one of these, James Eliot by name, to the
prince; "and hope that your Highness will soon leave this pestiferous
Spain. It is a dangerous place to alter a man and turn him. I myself in
a short time have perceived my own weakness, and am almost turned."

"What motive had you?" asked Charles. "What have you seen that should
turn you?"

"Marry," replied Eliot, "when I was in England, I turned the whole Bible
over to find Purgatory, and because I could not find it there I believed
there was none. But now that I have come to Spain, I have found it here,
and that your Highness is in it; whence that you may be released, we,
your Highness's servants, who are going to Paradise, will offer unto God
our utmost devotions."

A purgatory