Chapter 3

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