Page:Hilda Wade (1900).pdf/80

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 witchlike. 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 any one, 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 Kenil-