More fastidious, Greenacre could have wished his egg some six months fresher, and his drink less obviously a concoction of rinsings.  But he was a guest, and his breeding did not allow him to complain.  Of the funeral he shrank from speaking; but the few words he dropped were such as would have befitted ’a genuine grief.  Gammon even heard him murmur, unconsciously, “poor Bolsover.”

Having eaten they wended their way to a little public-house, with a parlour known only to the favoured few, where Greenacre, after a glass or two of rum—­a choice for which he thought it necessary to apologize—­began to discourse upon a topic peculiarly his own.

“I couldn’t help thinking to-day, Gammon, what a strange assembly there would be if all a man’s relatives came to his funeral.  Nearly all of us must have such lots of distant connexions that we know nothing about.  Now a man like Bolsover—­an aristocrat, with fifty or more acknowledged relatives in good position—­think how many more there must be in out-of-the-way places, poor and unknown.  Ay, and some of them not so very distant kinsfolk either.  Think of the hosts of illegitimate children, for instance—­some who know who they are, and some who don’t.”

This was said so significantly that Gammon wondered whether it had a personal application.

“It’s a theory of mine,” pursued the other, his prominent eyes fixed on some far vision, “that every one of us, however poor, has some wealthy relative, if he could only be found.  I mean a relative within reasonable limits, not a cousin fifty times removed.  That’s one of the charms of London to me.  A little old man used to cobble my boots for me a few years ago in Ball’s Pond Road, He had an idea that one of his brothers, who went out to New Zealand and was no more heard of, had made a great fortune; said he’d dreamt about it again and again, and couldn’t get rid of the fancy.  Well, now, the house in which he lived took fire, and the poor old chap was burnt in his bed, and so his name got into the newspapers.  A day or two after I heard that his brother—­the one he spoke of—­had been living for some years scarcely a mile away at Stoke Newington—­a man rolling in money, a director of the British and Colonial Bank.”

“Rummy go!” remarked Gammon.

“When I was a lad,” pursued the other, after sipping at his refilled glass, “I lived just by an old church in the City, and I knew the verger, and he used to let me look over the registers.  I think that’s what gave me my turn for genealogy.  I believe there are fellows who get a living by hunting up pedigrees; that would just suit me, if I only knew how to start in the business.”

Gammon looked up and asked abruptly.

“Know anybody called Quodling?”

“Quodling?  No one personally.  But there’s a firm of Quodling, brushmakers or something.”

“Oil and colourmen?”

“Yes, to be sure.  Quodling?  Now I come to think of it—­why do you ask?”