They lunched joyously.  The mathematician drank a bottle of excellent hock, and did corresponding justice to the dishes.  His eyes gleamed with happiness; again he enlarged upon the benevolence of mankind, and the admirable ordering of the world.  From the club they drove to Bayswater, and made themselves comfortable in Barfoot’s flat, which was very plainly, but sufficiently, furnished.  Micklethwaite, cigar in mouth, threw his legs over the side of the easy-chair in which he was sitting.

‘Now,’ he began gravely, ’I don’t mind telling you that your conjecture was right.  I am going to be married.’

‘Well,’ said the other, ’you have reached the age of discretion.  I must suppose that you know what you are about.’

’Yes, I think I do.  The story is unexciting.  I am not a romantic person, nor is my future wife.  Now, you must know that when I was about twenty-three years old I fell in love.  You never suspected me of that, I dare say?’

‘Why not?’

’Well, I did fall in love.  The lady was a clergyman’s daughter at Hereford, where I had a place in a school; she taught the infants in an elementary school connected with ours; her age was exactly the same as my own.  Now, the remarkable thing was that she took a liking for me, and when I was scoundrel enough to tell her of my feeling, she didn’t reject me.’

‘Scoundrel enough?  Why scoundrel?’

’Why?  But I hadn’t a penny in the world.  I lived at the school, and received a salary of thirty pounds, half of which had to go towards the support of my mother.  What could possibly have been more villainous?  What earthly prospect was there of my being able to marry?’

‘Well, grant the monstrosity of it.’

’This lady—­a very little lower than the angels—­declared that she was content to wait an indefinite time.  She believed in me, and hoped for my future.  Her father—­the mother was dead—­sanctioned our engagement.  She had three sisters, one of them a governess, another keeping house, and the third a blind girl.  Excellent people, all of them.  I was at their house as often as possible, and they made much of me.  It was a pity, you know, for in those few leisure hours I ought to have been working like a nigger.’

‘Plainly you ought.’

’Fortunately, I left Hereford, and went to a school at Gloucester, where I had thirty-five pounds.  How we gloried over that extra five pounds!  But it’s no use going on with the story in this way; it would take me till to-morrow morning.  Seven years went by; we were thirty years old, and no prospect whatever of our engagement coming to anything.  I had worked pretty hard; I had taken my London degree; but not a penny had I saved, and all I could spare was still needful to my mother.  It struck me all at once that I had no right to continue the engagement.  On my thirtieth birthday I wrote a letter to Fanny—­that is her name—­and begged her to be free.  Now, would you have done the same, or not?’