I heard him gasp at the other end.

“But you’re not a millionaire!”

“I am!” I cried triumphantly.  And now I come to think of it, I spoke truly.  If a man reckons his capital as half a year’s income, doubles it, and works out the capital that such a yearly income represents, he is the possessor of a mint of money.

“I am,” I cried; “and I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll settle five thousand on Lucy and the children, so that they needn’t accompany you in your singing excursions.  I shouldn’t like them to catch cold, poor dears, and ruin their voices.”

In tones more than telephonically agonised he bade me not make a jest of his misery.  I nearly threw the receiver at the blockhead.

“I’m not jesting,” I bawled; “I’m deadly serious.  I knew Lucy before you did, and I kissed her and she kissed me years before she knew of your high existence; and if she had been a sensible woman she would have married me instead of you—­what?  The first time you’ve heard of it?  Of course it is—­and be decently thankful that you hear it now.”

It is pleasant sometimes to tell the husbands of girls you have loved exactly what you think of them; and I had loved Lucy Latimer.  She came, an English rose, to console me for the loss of my French fleur-de-lis, Clothilde.  Or was it the other way about?  One does get so mixed in these things.  At any rate, she did not marry me, her first love, but jilted me most abominably for Latimer.  So I shall heap five thousand pounds on her head.

I have been unfortunate in my love affairs.  I wonder why?  Which reminds me that I made the identical remark to Lucy Latimer a month or two ago.  (She is a plump, kind, motherly, unromantic little person now.) She had the audacity to reply that I had never had any.

“You, Lucy Crooks, dare say such a thing!” I exclaimed indignantly.

She smiled.  “Are there many more qualified than I to give the opinion?”

I remember that I rose and looked her sternly in the face.

“Lucy Crooks or Lucy Latimer,” said I, “you are nothing more or less than a common hussy.”

Whereupon she laughed as if I had paid her a high compliment.

I maintain that I have been unfortunate in my love affairs.  First, there was an angel-faced widow, a contemporary of my mother’s, whom I wooed in Greek verses—­and let me tell the young lover that it is much easier to write your own doggerel and convert it into Greek than to put “To Althea” into decent Anacreontics.  I also took her to the Eton and Harrow match, and talked to her of women’s hats and the things she loved, and neglected the cricket.  But she would have none of me.  In the flood tide of my passion she married a scorbutic archdeacon of the name of Jugg.  Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can’t remember.  It was something ending in “-ine.”  We quarrelled because we held divergent views on Mr.