d Mrs. Cumberledge, wife of Colonel
Thomas Cumberledge, of the 7th Bengals, was a Miss Ford, daughter of
a Mr. Ford, of Bangor.' That came to me like a lightning-gleam. Then I
said to myself again, 'Dr. Hubert Ford Cumberledge must be their son.'
So there you have 'the train of reasoning.' Women CAN reason--sometimes.
I had to think twice, though, before I could recall the exact words of
the Times notice."

"And can you do the same with everyone?"

"Everyone! Oh, come, now: that is expecting too much! I have not read,
marked, learned, and inwardly digested everyone's family announcements.
I don't pretend to be the Peerage, the Clergy List, and the London
Directory rolled into one. I remembered YOUR family all the more
vividly, no doubt, because of the pretty and unusual old Welsh names,
'Olwen' and 'Iolo Gwyn Ford,' which fixed themselves on my memory by
their mere beauty. Everything about Wales always attracts me; my Welsh
side is uppermost. But I have hundreds--oh, thousands--of such facts
stored and pigeon-holed in my memory. If anybody else cares to try me,"
she glanced round the table, "perhaps we may be able to test my power
that way."

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