How had Irene started the overtures that led to this?
In fact, she had repeatedly made overtures to her great-aunt to be reconciled, but these overtures had been always rejected.
But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying?
Etienne seized the opportunity to take aside four or five of the principal chiefs, and secretly tell them his suspicions that the Iroquois were plotting to compass their destruction under cover of overtures of peace; and he proposed that they should meet treachery with treachery.