asket destined for Lucy, Eustacie turned with her
sweetest, proudest smile, and said, 'No, no; I will not have it; what do
we two want with love-tokens now?'

Sidney had taken the youthful and romantic view of the case, and
considered himself to be taking the best possible bare of is young
friend, by enabling him to deal honourably with so charming a little
wife as Eustacie. Ambassador and tutor would doubtless be very angry;
but Sidney could judge for himself of the lady, and he therefore threw
himself into her interests, and sent his servant back to Paris to
procure the necessary sum for the journey of Master Henry Berenger and
Mistress Mary, his wife. Sidney was, on his return alone to Paris, to
explain all to the elders, and pacify them as best he could; and his
servant was already the bearer of a letter from Berenger that was to be
sent at once to England with Walsingham's dispatches, to prepare Lord
Walwyn for the arrival of the runaways. The poor boy laboured to
be impressively calm and reasonable in his explanation of the
misrepresentation, and of his strong grounds for assuming his rights,
with his persuasion that his wife would readily join the English
church--a consideration that he knew would greatly smooth the way for
her. Indeed, his own position was impregnable: nobody could blame him
for taking his own wife to himself, and he was so sure of her charms,
that he troubled himself very little about the impression she might make
on his kindred. If they loved her, it was all right; if not, he could
take her back to his own castle, and win fame and honour under the
banner of France in the Low Countries. As the Lucy Thistlewood, she was
far too discreet to feel any disappointment or displeasure; or if she
should, it was her own fault and that of his mother, for all her life
she had known him to be married. So he finished his letter with a
message that the bells should be ready to ring, and that when Philip
heard three guns fired on the coast, he might light the big beacon pile
above the Combe.

Meantime 'the Queen's Pastoral' was much relished by all the spectators.
The state of things was only avowed to Charles, Elisabeth, and Philip
Sidney, and even the last did not know of the renewed troth which the
King chose to treat as such a secret; but no one had any doubt of the
mutual relations of M. de Ribaumont and Mdlle. de Nid de Merle, and
their dream of bliss was like a pastoral for the special diversion of
th