CHAPTER III

THE EPISODE OF THE WIFE WHO DID HER DUTY

To make you understand my next yarn, I must go back to the date of my introduction to Hilda.

“It is witchcraft!” I said the first time I saw her, at Le Geyt’s luncheon-party.

She smiled a smile which was bewitching, indeed, but by no means witch-like,—­a frank, open smile with just a touch of natural feminine triumph in it.  “No, not witchcraft,” she answered, helping herself with her dainty fingers to a burnt almond from the Venetian glass dish,—­“not witchcraft,—­memory; aided, perhaps, by some native quickness of perception.  Though I say it myself, I never met anyone, I think, whose memory goes quite as far as mine does.”

“You don’t mean quite as far back,” I cried, jesting; for she looked about twenty-four, and had cheeks like a ripe nectarine, just as pink and just as softly downy.

She smiled again, showing a row of semi-transparent teeth, with a gleam in the depths of them.  She was certainly most attractive.  She had that indefinable, incommunicable, unanalysable personal quality which we know as charm.  “No, not as far back,” she repeated.  “Though, indeed, I often seem to remember things that happened before I was born (like Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth):  I recollect so vividly all that I have heard or read about them.  But as far in extent, I mean.  I never let anything drop out of my memory.  As this case shows you, I can recall even quite unimportant and casual bits of knowledge when any chance clue happens to bring them back to me.”

She had certainly astonished me.  The occasion for my astonishment was the fact that when I handed her my card, “Dr. Hubert Ford Cumberledge, St. Nathaniel’s Hospital,” she had glanced at it for a second and exclaimed, without sensible pause or break, “Oh, then, of course, you’re half Welsh, as I am.”

The instantaneous and apparent inconsecutiveness of her inference took me aback.  “Well, m’yes:  I am half Welsh,” I replied.  “My mother came from Carnarvonshire.  But, why then, and of course?  I fail to perceive your train of reasoning.”

She laughed a sunny little laugh, like one well accustomed to receive such inquiries.  “Fancy asking A woman to give you ’the train of reasoning’ for her intuitions!” she cried, merrily.  “That shows, Dr. Cumberledge, that you are a mere man—­a man of science, perhaps, but not a psychologist.  It also suggests that you are a confirmed bachelor.  A married man accepts intuitions, without expecting them to be based on reasoning. . . .  Well, just this once, I will stretch a point to enlighten you.  If I recollect right, your mother died about three years ago?”

“You are quite correct.  Then you knew my mother?”

“Oh, dear me, no!  I never even met her.  Why then?”