The question was put so purposefully that Peckover had no hesitation in answering it frankly. "No one but the barmaid. I've not been here more than two hours." "That's all right. Now for my proposition." He drew up yet an inch or two closer to Peckover. "First of all it is necessary for me to state I am a rich man; well, practically a millionaire." Peckover pushed back his own chair. "I say; no room for the confidence trick here, old man," he exclaimed suspiciously. "Try next door." "Pouf!" the stranger contemptuously blew away the suggestion. "'Confidence trick?' It's the other way on. It is I who am going to place the confidence in your lordship. Now, look. Here is my proposal in a word. You're a poor man, or at least a poor peer; I'm a rich man. We are both of us practically unknown over here. I want you to sell me your title." "What?" cried Peckover in amazement. "Don't make a noise," said the other quietly. "If this transaction is to go through, as, if you are not a fool, it will, the less attention we call to ourselves for the moment the better. Just hear what I've got to say. My name is Gage. Come into property down under from my father. Now I'm, as I say, a millionaire. But the devil of being a millionaire is, when you are nobody in particular but a millionaire, that you don't and can't get value for your money." "Ah!" Peckover nodded sagaciously as he began to comprehend. "Now," pursued Mr. Gage, "an ordinary person would imagine that a man with an income nearer forty than thirty thousand could have for the asking--and the paying for--the best of everything this world has to offer. All rot. An outsider like myself with the income I have mentioned doesn't have nearly such a good time as a smart young sprig of good family, who's been born and bred in the swim, can get with a beggarly fifteen hundred a year." "That's right enough," Peckover assented with an air of endorsing from experience that profound truth. Mr. Gage took out a coin and laid it on the table. "There's a sovereign," he said, tapping it impressively, while his companion eyed it covetously. "There it is. Coin of the realm. Value fixed and accepted all the world over, you'd say. Yet it's a strange thing, as society is constituted, that, according to the value to be got out of it, to one man it will be worth, say, five and thirty shillings, and to another about six and sixpence. You follow me?" Mr. Peckover intimated by a knowing nod that not only did he follow the argument, but that, as a member of the aristocracy, he was prepared to back it by getting the enhanced value from the coin in question. "The reason is," continued Mr. Gage, "that when you are what what's called an outsider you have to pay, and pay double and treble for everything. And when you've paid, and paid till you're sick of shelling out, you find you haven't got half what, if you'd only been 'class,' you'd have got gratis for nothing."