"This," declared Mr. Clifford, looking at the likeness on the other side, "is the portrait of the man I have known for many years as Joseph Oldfield."
"As who? That's my father!"
"Do you not know he had a business in town?"
"I did not know he had a business anywhere."
"He had; he carried on that business under a pseudonym; I have always known him as Joseph Oldfield; for the first time yesterday I heard the name of Donald Lindsay. It seems to have been his wish that his commercial and his private lives should be wholly distinct, overlapping at no point; he appears to have succeeded in carrying out that wish almost too well."
"How--how extraordinary; and yet I'm not surprised. That is what he has been trying to tell me all the time."
"All what time?"
There was something in her tone and manner which struck the two men as curious; a sort of exaltation.
"He has been coming to me, night after night, in my dreams, always in such trouble; always trying so hard to tell me something; but he never could. Now I know what it was. If he comes again he'll understand that I know, and his trouble will have gone. You mustn't laugh at me; in my dreams his coming has been so real." Judging from their faces neither of her hearers was inclined for laughter. She turned to Mr. Clifford. "What was my father's business?"
"He was the proprietor of Peter Piper's Popular Pills, of which you have probably heard."