“I send you all this nakedly,” concluded Langerac, “exactly as it has been communicated to me, having always answered according to my duty and with a view by negotiating with these persons to discover the intentions as well of one side as the other.”

The Advocate was not profoundly impressed by these revelations.  He was too experienced a statesman to doubt that in times when civil and religious passion was running high there was never lack of fishers in troubled waters, and that if a body of conspirators could secure a handsome compensation by selling their country to a foreign prince, they would always be ready to do it.

But although believed by Maurice to be himself a stipendiary of Spain, he was above suspecting the Prince of any share in the low and stupid intrigue which du Agean had imagined or disclosed.  That the Stadholder was ambitious of greater power, he hardly doubted, but that he was seeking to acquire it by such corrupt and circuitous means, he did not dream.  He confidentially communicated the plot as in duty bound to some members of the States, and had the Prince been accused in any conversation or statement of being privy to the scheme, he would have thought himself bound to mention it to him.  The story came to the ears of Maurice however, and helped to feed his wrath against the Advocate, as if he were responsible for a plot, if plot it were, which had been concocted by his own deadliest enemies.  The Prince wrote a letter alluding to this communication of Langerac and giving much alarm to that functionary.  He thought his despatches must have been intercepted and proposed in future to write always by special courier.  Barneveld thought that unnecessary except when there were more important matters than those appeared to him to be and requiring more haste.

“The letter of his Excellency,” said he to the Ambassador, “is caused in my opinion by the fact that some of the deputies to this assembly to whom I secretly imparted your letter or its substance did not rightly comprehend or report it.  You did not say that his Excellency had any such design or project, but that it had been said that the Contra-Remonstrants were entertaining such a scheme.  I would have shown the letter to him myself, but I thought it not fair, for good reasons, to make M. du Agean known as the informant.  I do not think it amiss for you to write yourself to his Excellency and tell him what is said, but whether it would be proper to give up the name of your author, I think doubtful.  At all events one must consult about it.  We live in a strange world, and one knows not whom to trust.”