or four months, when my leave
and her love took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together;
and there my fire of straw burnt itself out to a pitiful end with the
closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington
had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my
own lips, in August, 1882, she learnt that I was sick of her presence,
tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine
women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them;
seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by
active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the
hundredth. On her neither my openly-expressed aversion, nor the cutting
brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect.

"Jack, darling!" was her one eternal cuckoo-cry, "I'm sure it's all a
mistake--a hideous mistake; and we'll be good friends again some day.
_Please_ forgive me, Jack, dear."

I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity
into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate--the same
instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider
he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of
1882 came to an end.

Next year we met again at Simla--she with her monotonous face and timid
attempts at reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in every fiber of
my frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone; and on each
occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail
that it was all a "mistake"; and still the hope of eventually "making
friends." I might have seen, had I cared to look, that that hope only
was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You
will agree with me, at least, that such conduct would have driven any
one to despair. It was uncalled for, childish, unwomanly. I maintain
that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black,
fever-stricken night watches, I have begun to think that I might have
been a little kinder to her. But that really _is_ a "delusion." I could
not have continued pretending to love her when I didn't; could I? It
would have been unfair to us both.

Last year we met again--on the same terms as before. The same weary
appeals, and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make
her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the
old rel