Gilbert replied that he thought the speaker was going to settle the question for him, and Louis looked at him critically.
“I am afraid it will have to be something very dull. You can’t look like a brigand or anything really desirable. A lawyer—a doctor—no, parbleu, I have it, of course—an apothecary, like our late host. It will be quite a safe profession, for not having any drugs with you, you cannot be called upon to make up pills on the spur of the moment. And, as I know to my cost, you can talk by the hour about vegetables.”
Gilbert smiled, but conceded that the plan, if called for, might be worth trying. “Only do not go about announcing us as druggists without necessity,” he warned the inventor. “I can bandage a cut, but that is the extent of my surgical knowledge.”
“Never mind; perhaps you will have a chance of putting even that accomplishment in practice,” said Louis, switching at a wayside thistle. And again he did not know that he was invested with the gift of prophecy.
CHAPTER XIX
CONCERNING A HANDKERCHIEF
“If you be the Earl, as I think you be,
Sit down and drink the red wine with me;
But I rede ye, when ye shall rise from the board,
Ye commend your soul to the saints, my lord!”
At noon they came into the square at Mamers. Louis was in wild spirits; amused with the country people who thronged the wide market-place—it was market-day—and wanting to buy all kinds of useless objects at the stalls as they picked their way through the crowd looking for an inn. The Hôtel d’Espagne appeared so full that they chose an eating-house instead, and hence, after a modest repast, Gilbert sallied forth to enquire for a conveyance. He came back with the disconcerting intelligence that the diligence for Fresnay and Sillé-le-Guillaume had already started, and that there would not be another till the late afternoon.