D'Artagnan left them to sleep in a den in Newkerke street, whilst he lodged comfortably upon the Grand Canal.

He learned that the king of England had come back to his old ally, William II.

of Nassau, stadtholder of Holland.

He learned also that the refusal of Louis XIV.

had a little cooled the protection afforded him up to that time, and in consequence he had gone to reside in a little village house at Scheveningen, situated in the downs, on the sea-shore, about a league from the Hague.
There, it was said, the unfortunate banished king consoled himself in his exile, by looking, with the melancholy peculiar to the princes of his race, at that immense North Sea, which separated him from his England, as it had formerly separated Mary Stuart from France.