also published as The Traveller Returns

Miss Silver – #09, 1945

The air in the Food Office was cold and stuffy. It would be nice to get out into the fresh air again. It would be nice when this business was over. She hadn’t really been waiting for so long, but she felt an angry impatience. To go through all she had gone through, to come back quite literally from the dead, and to be wasting time standing in a queue for a ration card was, at the very least of it, an anticlimax. She was Anne Jocelyn come back from the dead, and here she was in a queue, waiting for a ration card instead of ringing up Philip.

The people in front of her moved on slowly. She began to think about Philip. Three years was a long time to have been dead. Philip had been a widower for more than three years, and in about half an hour somebody would call him to the telephone and a voice-her voice-would impart the glad tidings that Anne Jocelyn wasn’t dead. It gave her a good deal of pleasure to think about telling Philip that he wasn’t a widower after all.

Suppose he wasn’t there… A curious tingling ran over her from head to foot. It was exactly the feeling she might have had if her next slow step forward had shown her the floor broken away and her foot poised above a descending emptiness. She had a moment of vertigo. Then it passed. Philip would be there. If he had had no news of her, something of his movements, his whereabouts, had been conveyed by careful, circuitous channels to those who had helped her on her way. He had been in Egypt, in Tunisia.