Two or three of the company accepted her challenge, giving the full names of their sisters or brothers; and, in three cases out of five, my witch was able to supply either the notice of their marriage or some other like published circumstance.  In the instance of Charlie Vere, it is true, she went wrong, just at first, though only in a single small particular; it was not Charlie himself who was gazetted to a sub-lieutenancy in the Warwickshire Regiment, but his brother Walter.  However, the moment she was told of this slip, she corrected herself at once, and added, like lightning, “Ah, yes:  how stupid of me!  I have mixed up the names.  Charles Cassilis Vere got an appointment on the same day in the Rhodesian Mounted Police, didn’t he?” Which was in point of fact quite accurate.

But I am forgetting that all this time I have not even now introduced my witch to you.

Hilda Wade, when I first saw her, was one of the prettiest, cheeriest, and most graceful girls I have ever met—­a dusky blonde, brown-eyed, brown-haired, with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy.  And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her.  In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl.  Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough.  But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling—­a gleam of sunshine.  She laid no claim to supernatural powers; she held no dealings with familiar spirits; she was simply a girl of strong personal charm, endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine intuition.  Her memory, she told me, she shared with her father and all her father’s family; they were famous for their prodigious faculty in that respect.  Her impulsive temperament and quick instincts, on the other hand, descended to her, she thought, from her mother and her Welsh ancestry.

Externally, she seemed thus at first sight little more than the ordinary pretty, light-hearted English girl, with a taste for field sports (especially riding), and a native love of the country.  But at times one caught in the brightened colour of her lustrous brown eyes certain curious undercurrents of depth, of reserve, and of a questioning wistfulness which made you suspect the presence of profounder elements in her nature.  From the earliest moment of our acquaintance, indeed, I can say with truth that Hilda Wade interested me immensely.  I felt drawn.  Her face had that strange quality of compelling attention for which we have as yet no English name, but which everybody recognises.  You could not ignore her.  She stood out.  She was the sort of girl one was constrained to notice.