‘No,’ said Eustace; ’if I am ever strong enough again I must return to Paris, and endeavour to overcome their opposition.’  And he spoke with a weary sigh, though I augured that he would soon improve under our care, and that of Tryphena, who had always been better for him than any doctor.  Then I could not help reproaching him a little with having ventured himself in that terrible climate and hopeless cause.

‘As to the climate, that was not so much amiss,’ said Eustace.  ’Western Scotland is better and more wholesome than these Dutch marshes.  The sea-gull fares better than the frog.’

‘But the cause,’ I said.  ‘Why did you not wait to go with the King?’

‘There were reasons, Meg,’ he said.  ’The King was hounding—–­yes, hounding out the Marquis to lead the forlorn hope.  Heaven forgive me for my disloyalty in thinking he wished to be quit of one so distasteful to the Covenanters who have invited him.’

And when I broke forth in indignation, Eustace lowered his voice, and said sadly that the King was changed in many points from the Prince of Wales, and that listening to policy was not good for him.  Then I asked why, if the King hounded, as he called it, the Marquis, on this unhappy expedition, should Eustace have share in it?

‘It was enough to anger any honest man,’ said Eustace, ’to see the flower of all the cavaliers thus risked without a man of rank or weight to back him, with mere adventurers and remnants of Goring’s fellows, and Irishmen that could only do him damage with the Scots.  I, with neither wife nor child, might well be the one to share the venture.’

‘Forgetting your sisters,’ said I.  ’Ah, Eustace, was there no other cause to make you restless?’

’You push me hard, Meg.  Yes, to you I will say it, that there was a face among the ladies here which I could not look on calmly, and I knew it was best for her and for myself that I should be away.’

‘Is she there still?’ I asked.

’I know not.  Her husband had taken her to his country-house last time I heard, and very few know that I am not gone with the King.  It was but at the last moment that he forbade me.  It is better so.’

I thought of what his hostess had told me, but I decided for the present to keep my own counsel.

We thought it right to pay our respects to the Princess of Orange, but she was keeping very little state.  Her husband, the Stadholder, was on bad terms with the States, and had just failed in a great attack on Amsterdam; and both he and she were indisposed.  The Princess Royal replied therefore to our request for admittance, that she could not refuse to see such old friends of her family as the ladies of Ribaumont, but that we must excuse her for giving us a private reception.