s dissatisfaction at these
depredations and at the English admiral who attempted to defend what had
been done.

He then took leave of his guests, and went off to bed, where it was his
custom to pass his afternoons.

It was certain that the Constable of Castile was now to arrive very soon,
and the marquis had, meantime, obtained information on which he relied,
that this ambassador would come charged with very advantageous offers to
the English court. Accounts had been got ready in council, of all the
moneys due to England by France and by the States, and it was thought
that these sums, payment of which was to be at once insisted upon,
together with the Spanish dollars set afloat in London, would prove
sufficient to buy up all resistance to the Spanish alliance.

Such being the nature of the information furnished to De Rosny, he did
not look forward with very high hopes to the issue of the conference
indicated by King James at the Greenwich dinner. As, after all, he would
have to deal once more with Cecil, the master-spirit of the Spanish
party, it did not seem very probable that the king's whispered
professions of affection for France, his very loud denunciations of
Spanish ambition, and his promises of support to the struggling
provinces, would be brought into any substantial form for human
nourishment. Whispers and big words, touching of glasses at splendid
banquets, and proposing of royal toasts, would not go far to help those
soldiers in Ostend, a few miles away, fighting two years long already for
a square half-mile of barren sand, in which seemed centred the world's
hopes of freedom.

Barneveld was inclined to take an even more gloomy view than that
entertained by the French ambassador. He had, in truth, no reason to be
sanguine. The honest republican envoys had brought no babies to offer in
marriage. Their little commonwealth had only the merit of exchanging
buffets forty years long with a power which, after subjugating the
Netherlands, would have liked to annihilate France and England too, and
which, during that period, had done its best to destroy and dismember
both. It had only struggled as no nation in the world's history had ever
done, for the great principle upon which the power and happiness of
England were ever to depend. It was therefore not to be expected that its
representatives should be received with the distinction conferred upon
royal envoys. Barneveld and his colleagues accordingly were not inv