Just this time yesterday he had come in and found Sylvia alone.
She had got up, he remembered, to give him greeting, and just opposite the fireplace they had come face to face.

She held in her hand a small white rose which she had plucked in the tiny garden here in the middle of London.

It was not a very fine specimen, but it was a rose, and she had said in answer to his depreciatory glance: "But you must see it when I have washed it.

One has to wash London flowers." Then.

.