Schriederling.
He could not have been MUCH more than thirty-five years her senior; and,
as he lived on two hundred rupees a month and had money of his own,
he was well off. He belonged to good people, and suffered in the cold
weather from lung complaints. In the hot weather he dangled on the brink
of heat-apoplexy; but it never quite killed him.

Understand, I do not blame Schriederling. He was a good husband
according to his lights, and his temper only failed him when he was
being nursed. Which was some seventeen days in each month. He was almost
generous to his wife about money matters, and that, for him, was a
concession. Still Mrs. Schreiderling was not happy. They married her
when she was this side of twenty and had given all her poor little heart
to another man. I have forgotten his name, but we will call him
the Other Man. He had no money and no prospects. He was not even
good-looking; and I think he was in the Commissariat or Transport. But,
in spite of all these things, she loved him very madly; and there was
some sort of an engagement between the two when Schreiderling appeared
and told Mrs. Gaurey that he wished to marry her daughter. Then the
other engagement was broken off--washed away by Mrs. Gaurey's tears,
for that lady governed her house by weeping over disobedience to her
authority and the lack of reverence she received in her old age. The
daughter did not take after her mother. She never cried. Not even at the
wedding.

The Other Man bore his loss quietly, and was transferred to as bad a
station as he could find. Perhaps the climate consoled him. He suffered
from intermittent fever, and that may have distracted him from his other
trouble. He was weak about the heart also. Both ways. One of the valves
was affected, and the fever made it worse. This showed itself later on.

Then many months passed, and Mrs. Schreiderling took to being ill. She
did not pine away like people in story books, but she seemed to pick
up every form of illness that went about a station, from simple fever
upwards. She was never more than ordinarily pretty at the best of times;
and the illness made her ugly. Schreiderling said so. He prided himself
on speaking his mind.

When she ceased being pretty, he left her to her own devices, and went
back to the lairs of his bachelordom. She used to trot up and down Simla
Mall in a forlorn sort of way, with a gray Terai hat well on the back
of her head, and a shocking bad saddle under