Three years ago it was my fortune—­my great misfortune—­to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side.  It does not in the least concern you to know what manner of woman she was.  Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another.  Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity.  In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts.  From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was conscious that Agnes’s passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and—­if I may use the expression—­a purer sentiment than mine.  Whether she recognized the fact then, I do not know.  Afterwards it was bitterly plain to both of us.

Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three 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.