On Saturday afternoon the Phillipson family motored to the White Horse Hill at Uffington. For Andrew and Alison it was a rare treat, and Mrs. Phillipson watched them lovingly as they gambolled with gay abandon about the Downs. So much had passed between her and Donald these last few days. On Tuesday evening their very lives together had seemed to be hanging by the slenderest of threads. But now, this bright and chilly afternoon, the future stretched out before them, open and free as the broad landscape around them. She would write, she decided, a long, long letter to Morse, and try to thank him from the bottom of her heart. For on that terrible evening it had been Morse who had found Donald and brought him to her; it had been Morse who had seemed to know and to understand all things about them both. .
On Saturday evening Mrs. Grace Taylor sat staring blankly through the window on to the darkened street. They had returned from their holiday in mid-afternoon, and things seemed very much the same as she had left them. At a quarter-past eight, by the light of the street lamp, she saw Morse walking slowly, head down, towards the pub. She gave him no second thought
Earlier in the evening she had gone out into the front garden and clipped off the heads of a few last fading roses. But there had been one late scarlet bloom that was still in perfect flower. She had cut that off too, and it now stood on the mantelshelf, in a cheap glass vase that Valerie had won on a shooting stall at St. Giles's Fair, beneath the ducks that winged their way towards the ceiling in the empty room behind her.
Some of them never did come home. . never.
