"Now, farewell," he said, "lest you shame my appearance—I shall be at Gravesend to-night and, given fair wind, at Maaslandsluys in a day." He pressed Mr. Sidney’s hand, smiled, and hastened down the steps. With a sobbing swish of water the boat drew up; the oars clanked in the rowlocks. Mr. Sidney watched the tall figure in the red breeches of the sailor step in, look back and wave his hand; then the boat joined the others that covered the dark river, and was soon lost to sight in the cross glimmers of lanterns and half-seen shapes. Mr. Sidney remained gazing down the Thames—behind him the great capital rejoicing with their bells and rockets and bonfires, their shouting and singing, behind him the luxurious palace where the King must be enduring a sharp humiliation. Mr. Sidney smiled; he thought with a keenness rare in his soft nature of his brother who had laid down his life on Tower Hill through the intrigues of the Duke of York, now King. It astonished himself how much the memory of that injury rankled. He had not loved his brother to half the measure that he hated the man who had brought him to death. Indolent in mind and temper, he loathed cruelty, and the blood of Algernon Sidney was not the only witness to the cruelty of James Stewart. Mr. Sidney had seen the look on the fair face of Lord Monmouth when he landed at the Tower stairs; he had seen well-born men and women, implicated only indirectly in the late rebellion, shipped off to Virginia as slaves, while the Italian Queen and her women quarrelled over the price of them; he had seen, in this short reign, many acts of an extraordinary tyranny and cruelty, and his thoughts dealt triumphantly on Mr. Herbert, slipping down the river out of the tumult and excitement to the quiet of Gravesend with an important little paper in his seaman’s coat pocket. CHAPTER IV THE MESSENGER FROM ENGLAND Madame de Marsac, one time Miss Basilea Gage and maid of honour to the Queen of England, sat in the window-place of an inn in The Hague and looked down into the street. There was an expression of indifference on her face and of listlessness in her attitude, though a man in black velvet was standing near to her and speaking with an appearance of great energy, and he was M. D’Avaux, minister of King Louis XIV to the States General. Basilea was Romanist, of a family who had held that faith since the days of Queen Mary Tudor; her husband, two years dead, an officer in the French Army, had left her with a small fortune and no regrets, since she was yet undecided as to whether she had liked him or no; though too clever to be unhappy she was miserably idle, and had drifted from Paris back to London, and from London to Amsterdam, where her late lord’s people were prominent among the powerful French faction, and still without finding any interest in life.