“I thank you, Señor,” answered Castell. “You are very good to me and mine. I am sorry that you have been kept waiting. They tell me that you looked for me in the chapel, but I was not there, who had already left it for my office.”
“So I found. It is a quaint place, that old chapel of yours, and while I waited I went to the altar and told my beads there, which I had no time to do before I left my lodgings.”
Castell started almost imperceptibly, and glanced at d’Aguilar with his quick eyes, then turned the subject and asked if he would not breakfast with them. He declined, however, saying that he must be about their business and his own, then promptly proposed that he should come to supper on the following night that was—Sunday—and make report how things had gone, a suggestion that Castell could not but accept.
So he bowed and smiled himself out of the house, and walked thoughtfully into Holborn, for it had pleased him to pay this visit on foot, and unattended. At the corner whom should he meet again but the tall, fair-haired Betty, returning from some errand which she had found it convenient to fulfil just then.
“What,” he said, “you once more! The saints are very kind to me this morning. Come, Señora, walk a little way with me, for I would ask you a few questions.”
Betty hesitated, then gave way. It was seldom that she found the chance of walking through Holborn with such a noble-looking cavalier.
“Never look at your working-dress,” he said.
“With such a shape, what matters the robe that covers it?”—a compliment at which Betty blushed, for she was proud of her fine figure.
“Would you like a mantilla of real Spanish lace for your head and shoulders? Well, you shall have one that I brought from Spain with me, for I know no other lady in the land whom it would become better. But, Mistress Betty, you told me wrong about your master. I went to the chapel and he was not there.”
“He was there, Señor,” she answered, eager to set herself right with this most agreeable and discriminating foreigner, “for I saw him go in a moment before, and he did not come out again.”