Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and giggle. “_Noblesse oblige_,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at rest.” I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller. “Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate. “That’s me,” he said, going on with his work. “That’s _me_, too,” I said, snatching at resolution. He glanced up a moment. “O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.” “Three?” “My name, your name--and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’ thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now, sir?” The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip. “Who _is_ the other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?” “Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare. “Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t, seeing as how he was christened, _if_ he were, a matter of what--why it must be twenty year ago.” “Who was christened?” I asked. “The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.” He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory. “I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess. She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless me! How she comes back!” He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued luminously: “I recollect the very day she bought it of me--just as plain I do as if it was print.” “Bought what?” I ventured.