Nevertheless, the lady was London-bound, had merely forgotten to change the label. The little fat, dapper man with the bow-tie, edging closer through the crowd and trying to catch the girl’s eye, had taken a brief squint at that label because it was always handy to know a girl’s name—but after that brief squint his whole attention was on the girl herself. Debonnair Delacroix was half French, and unmistakably so even to the little fat man who kept a pub in Balham. And even in a crowd which had a fair sprinkling of whole-blooded French girls in it, Miss Delacroix stood out a mile. Figure, hair, clothes all helped to do it, though personality could have managed pretty well on its own. She was a tawny girl, fresh and golden-skinned, with a light, attractive dusting of freckles—lion-coloured, almost, and with the same grace in her movements—and there was just that delightful touch of imperious carelessness, a carelessness which wasn’t in the least studied as it might have been in a wholly English girl, and a faint air of unleonine helplessness, rather appealing helplessness which was actually entirely misleading.
