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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. Shaw’s own opinion was that for sheer efficiency she had him beat to a frazzle, and Shaw knew what he was talking about, because he’d worked with her in the past.
    The Eastern Petroleum Company, not knowing Shaw, couldn’t have expressed an opinion on their relative efficiency, but they did know that when she had left the Foreign Office she had been given a first-class write-up; and they had given her a pretty high position in their Travel and Service Department, the organization which dealt with the arrangements for transport of the Company’s employees by sea, land, and air throughout the world and the accommodation, entertainment, and customary flapdoodle for General Managers and other V.I.P.’s visiting the London Office from overseas—and that was quite a big job for a girl of not quite twenty-eight to handle.
    A high-heeled shoe tapped rather impatiently as Debonnair’s bright-eyed glance swept over the heads of the crowd. The glance came to rest on the little fat man. The little fat man tweaked at his bow-tie, gave a slight wriggle of an overdressed bottom, and ogled her from under a bald head which reflected back the lighting system of the air terminal; the glance, unsoftened by these tactics, refused to melt into a smile, rested on him coldly, though amusement lurked in the corners of the mouth and in the eyes.
    “Toffee-nosed,” muttered the little man in disgust.
    “Not in the least,” said Miss Delacroix frigidly, “but I think that’s your wife approaching, isn’t it?”
    The little man shrank. Looking round, he saw the large bosom bearing down on him from the Ladies’, a long string of cheap imitation pearls cast round it like a griping-band on the swelling broadside of a lifeboat; the straw brim of the meal-coloured hat, the one with the violet clusters which he’d bought her at the Co-op before they came away on holiday, topped her like a crust on a cottage loaf. The dapper little man had never hated that hat as much as he did at this moment; he looked sad, jowls drooping into a blue-shadowed line like a long-suffering bloodhound baulked once again of its quarry.
    “You win, dear,” he muttered to Miss Delacroix. “Bin different if the old woman ’adn’t a bin here, p’raps?”
    Miss Delacroix smiled then. She was attractive already, but those dimples, the fat man thought, cor! They didn’t ought to ’ave bin allowed. “Perhaps,” she agreed kindly.
    The bosom hove in between them with a glare from a turkey-red face above, and then the loudspeakers hummed and woke into voluble urgency.
    Hie crowd got on the move.
    She hadn’t been back in the tiny flatlet in Albany Street for long when Shaw telephoned.
    She said delightedly, “How lovely of you to ring, darling. I’m just in, only this minute. How’re things with you?”
    “So-so.” Shaw was non-committal. “I thought we might have dinner somewhere. Like to?”
    “Would I?” She thought: I know that tone—he’s off somewhere again. Just for a brief moment she regretted the events which had led to her having to quit the Foreign Office— events which, through no