"Do you know who the proprietor was?"
Again the two men eyed each other; this time as if Nash was trying to read in Morgan's eyes the answer to his question.
"He was Donald Lindsay of Cloverlea."
"You don't mean it?"
"I do."
"Are you sure?"
"Perfectly. He called himself Joseph Oldfield; he was a bachelor; he was a reserved man, standoffish, of secretive habits. He had a flat in Bloomsbury Square, I've seen it, where he was supposed to spend most of his time in thinking out new advertising dodges; the present position of Peter Piper's Popular Pills is principally owing to clever advertising. The proprietor was his own advertising agent, he was a master of the art. He called himself, as I've said, Joseph Oldfield in town, and in the country he was Donald Lindsay of Cloverlea."
"The old fox!"
"I don't think you can exactly call him that; there was nothing in the opprobrious sense foxy about him. He was one of those men who live double lives, owing, one might say, to the pressure of circumstances; there are more of them about than is supposed. He bought the pill business when it was at a very low ebb; he hadn't very much money himself, at that time, and I dare say he got it for a song. Mrs. Lindsay was just dead; his girl was with her nurses, or at school; for business purposes he called himself Oldfield; it isn't every man who cares to have it known that he's associated with a patent medicine; in England it's quite a common custom for a man to carry on a business under an alias, under half-a-dozen aliases sometimes. As time went on I take it that his secretive habit grew stronger; he became less and less disposed to have it known that Donald Lindsay had anything to do with pills, which do rather stink in people's nostrils; and so he drifted into the double life. That's the word, drifted."
"You seem to have got up his history."