“We must be riding,” said Garlick at last; “these moors are strange to me; and it will be dark in half an hour.”

“Will you allow me to be your guide, sir?” asked Anthony of the priest.  “It is all in my road, and you will not be troubled with questions or answers if you are in my company.”

“But what of your friend, sir?”

“Oh!  Robin knows the country as he knows the flat of his hand.  We were about to separate as we met you.”

“Then we will thankfully accept your guidance, sir,” said the priest gravely.

An impulse seized upon Robin as he was about to say good-day, though he was ashamed of it five minutes later as a modest lad would be.  Yet he followed it now; he leapt off his horse and, holding Cecily’s rein in his arm, kneeled on the stones with both knees.

“Your blessing, sir,” he said to the priest.  And Anthony eyed him with astonishment.

III

Robin was moved, as he rode home over the high moors, and down at last upon the woods of Matstead, in a manner that was new to him, and that he could not altogether understand.  He had met travelling priests before; indeed, all the priests whose masses he had ever heard, or from whom he had received the sacraments, were travelling priests who went in peril; and yet this young man, upon whose consecrated hands the oil was scarcely yet dry, moved and drew his heart in a manner that he had never yet known.  It was perhaps something in the priest’s face that had so affected him; for there was a look in it of a kind of surprised timidity and gentleness, as if he wondered at himself for being so foolhardy, and as if he appealed with that same wonder and surprise to all who looked on him.  His voice, too, was gentle, as if tamed for the seminary and the altar; and his whole air and manner wholly unlike that of some of the priests whom Robin knew—­loud-voiced, confident, burly men whom you would have sworn to be country gentlemen or yeomen living on their estates or farms and fearing to look no man in the face.  It was this latter kind, thought Robin, that was best suited to such a life—­to riding all day through north-country storms, to lodging hardily where they best could, to living such a desperate enterprise as a priest’s life then was, with prices upon their heads and spies everywhere.  It was not a life for quiet persons like Mr. Simpson, who, surely, would be better at his books in some college abroad, offering the Holy Sacrifice in peace and security, and praying for adventurers more hardy than himself.  Yet here was Mr. Simpson just set out upon such an adventure, of his own free-will and choice, with no compulsion save that of God’s grace.

* * * * *

There was yet more than an hour before supper-time when he rode into the court at last; and Dick Sampson, his own groom, came to take his horse from him.

“The master’s not been from home to-day, sir,” said Dick when Robin asked of his father.