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.