Being an honest, straightforward young fellow, he of course followed the prescribed programme of all blighted love affairs. He began by pitying himself for the sorrow he was undergoing, then went on to picture the future that might have been theirs had she married him; but before they were clear of the Bay he had arrived at the invariable conclusion, and was pitying himself for pitying the girl who was foolish enough to jilt such an entirely estimable young man as Edward Braithwaite Colchester.
One moonlight night, after leaving "Gib," he was leaning over the rails of the promenade deck, feeling sympathetically inclined to the world in general, when somebody stepped up beside him. It was Miss Hinks. She prefaced her conversation with two or three questions about the sea, and he made the astounding discovery that her voice possessed just the note of sympathy he required for his complaint. He had felt sorry for her because other people snubbed her, and she for him because she had been told exaggerated stories about his love affair. Together they made rather a curious couple.
"One moonlight night ... somebody stepped up beside him."
When, under the supervision of the "Kangaroo Girl," the shore parties for Naples were being organized, Miss Hinks was tacitly left out. Somehow the impression got about that she was poor, and no one cared about paying her expenses. But eventually she did go, and it was in the charge of the fourth officer. When she thanked him for his kindness, he forgot for the moment his pledge "to live henceforth only in a memory."
The "Kangaroo Girl," on discovering that Miss Hinks had been on shore, under the escort of that "dear little pink officer," was vastly amused, and christened them Cupid and Psyche.
Now, the end of it all was, that Teddy began to find himself caring less and less for the thumb-stained photograph in his locker, and more and more for the privilege of pumping his sorrows into a certain sympathetic ear. Shipboard allows so many opportunities of meeting; and, strange as it may appear, a broken heart is quickest mended when subjected to a second rending. This cure is based on the homœopathic principle of like curing like.