The priest saw that here was an opportunity ready-made; but there was one more point on which he must satisfy himself first, and what seemed to him an inspiration came to his mind.
"He looks like a minister," he said carelessly.
A curious veiled look came over the woman's face. Robin made a bold venture. He smiled full in her face.
"You need not fear," he said. "I quarrel with no man's religion;" and, at the look in her face at this, he added: "You are a Catholic, I suppose? Well, I am one too. And so, I suppose, is Mr. Bourgoign."
The woman smiled tremulously, and the fear left her eyes.
"Yes, sir," she said. "All the friends of her Grace are Catholics, I think."
He nodded to her again genially. Then, turning, he went to meet the apothecary, who was now not thirty yards away.
* * * * *
It was a pathetic old figure that was hobbling towards him. He seemed a man of near seventy years old, with a close-cropped beard and spectacles on his nose, and he carried himself heavily and ploddingly. Robin argued to himself that it must be a kindly man who would come out at this hour—perhaps the one hour he had to himself—to visit a poor dependant. Yet all this was sheer conjecture; and, as the old man came near, he saw there was something besides kindliness in the eyes that met his own.
He saluted boldly and deferentially.