"
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.
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