a
young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is
an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like,
and blase, and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers
from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very
happy in a tender, twilight fashion.

Hannasyde's affair of the heart had been a Godsend to him. It was four
years old, and the girl had long since given up thinking of it. She had
married and had many cares of her own. In the beginning, she had told
Hannasyde that, "while she could never be anything more than a sister
to him, she would always take the deepest interest in his welfare." This
startlingly new and original remark gave Hannasyde something to think
over for two years; and his own vanity filled in the other twenty-four
months. Hannasyde was quite different from Phil Garron, but, none the
less, had several points in common with that far too lucky man.

He kept his unrequited attachment by him as men keep a well-smoked
pipe--for comfort's sake, and because it had grown dear in the using. It
brought him happily through the Simla season. Hannasyde was not lovely.
There was a crudity in his manners, and a roughness in the way in which
he helped a lady on to her horse, that did not attract the other sex
to him. Even if he had cast about for their favor, which he did not. He
kept his wounded heart all to himself for a while.

Then trouble came to him. All who go to Simla, know the slope from the
Telegraph to the Public Works Office. Hannasyde was loafing up the hill,
one September morning between calling hours, when a 'rickshaw came down
in a hurry, and in the 'rickshaw sat the living, breathing image of the
girl who had made him so happily unhappy. Hannasyde leaned against the
railing and gasped. He wanted to run downhill after the 'rickshaw, but
that was impossible; so he went forward with most of his blood in his
temples. It was impossible, for many reasons, that the woman in the
'rickshaw could be the girl he had known. She was, he discovered later,
the wife of a man from Dindigul, or Coimbatore, or some out-of-the-way
place, and she had come up to Simla early in the season for the good of
her health. She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the
end of the season; and in all likelihood would never return to Simla
again, her proper Hill-station being Ootacamund. That night, Hannasyde,
raw and savage from the raking up