Well, in we all three clumped to the shop with coloured globes and show-cards and dangling bunches of "baby's-comforters" and sponges of Victorian date. And here there met our astonished eyes that figure that was so utterly and entirely uncharacteristic of "the town," or of anything at all in the country round about it!
It was a girl, in an ultra-smart, white and black rubber rain-coat, with a small black and white rain-hat set at an indescribably French angle on her head. Our first glimpse of her, as she stood with her back to us and her face to the obviously paralysed little Welsh chemist, gave us the impression of some slim and elegant magpie who had flown in there to shelter from the rain.
She was speaking. Her high-pitched, clear drawl seemed to belong to Bond Street.
"But d'you mean to say you don't keep any of Roget et Collet's things?"
Then, as we Land girls came clumping and dripping in, she turned with a little stare that seemed to say, "What figures of fun have we here?"
Our rainy-day kit is scarcely dainty. That brown Board of Agriculture mackintosh with the flappy cape-sleeves seemed to amuse the pretty townified girl.
Ravishingly pretty she was in her small-mouthed, big-eyed, Lily-Elsie style with an authentic curl twisting in front of her pink ear, and eyelashes to which the rain-drops hung. How perfectly suited, too, by the costly simple "rightness" of her clothes. Girl and "get-up" composed a type one would scarcely have expected to see here.
The last person I expected to see—for I had seen her before!
With my second good hard look at this fashionable vision I recognized her.
"Hul-lo! You here? It is you, isn't it!" I exclaimed.