With her towns garrisoned by foreign troops, her arms wrested from her grasp, her treasury rifled, her fleet dismantled, what could wretched Portugal do but sit sullenly in her chains, desperate of relief? Could the hand of one man, even though the hand of her lawful King, hope to break those bonds? The thought was madness. Sebastian saw that to follow his heart’s impulse, and fly immediately to the succour of his subjects, would be only to offer himself up an useless victim; he would be only exciting fresh blood to flow, fresh horrors to arise: unless acknowledged and assisted by other powers, and that at some critical moment of Spanish weakness, he could not expect to regain or to restore his people to liberty. There was no path for him but that he was now in: he must seek the advice of Don Emanuel De Castro, and try through him the temper of his trans-atlantic subjects. The bitterness of his regret for having originally caused all this suffering to Portugal, was like the anguish of a father who beholds his only son plunged into crime and misery through his own faulty indulgence. Sebastian’s heart might be said to weep blood, while he enumerated the enormities of Philip, and the wrongs of the Portuguese: the gloom of his looks saddened Kara Aziek, and when tenderly inquiring his thoughts, she learnt their painful nature, it cost her some effort to conquer her sympathy, and exert herself to argue away his excess of self-reproach. By gentle degrees she changed the current of his reflections, though they turned into one not so smooth as the hand of wedded love would willingly have made it. Sebastian had frequently conversed with his wife on the subject of her new religion; but in the hurry of land-travelling, those conversations had been short and unsatisfactory: sufficient however to shew the afflicted husband that the wife of his bosom nourished what he believed a fatal system of error, denounced by the church, and abhorred of God. It was in the leisure of a long voyage that he hoped to eradicate these pernicious doctrines. Having fortunately encountered a Brazil-trader at Massignan and procured a passage in her to St. Salvador, he began now to make the attempt: Kara Aziek met his scrutiny with frankness and confidence. All other opinions she would have hoped and wished to find yield to his sounder reasoning; but over this important point, the weakness of fond woman dared not usurp any influence.