In the hall there was a telephone and it had extensions in both the sitting-room and the bedroom. She had already thought of trying to get through, by one of them to Colonel Verney, and now she considered that possibility again. She actually got as far as lifting the receiver in the sitting-room, but as the dialling tone sounded quickly put it down again. Since her absent captor had so swiftly and accurately become aware of her intentions the previous afternoon it seemed certain that his highly developed psychic sense would again warn him that she was about to betray him. She was no longer capable of even leaving the house. If he returned imbued with the belief that she had been endeavouring to bring about his arrest it was quite on the cards that he might kill her. The risk was too great to take.

She then searched the room for a book in the hope that it would take her mind off her wretched situation, but apparently the telephone directory was the only book in the house. Too depressed even to listen to the radio, for the remainder of the afternoon she abandoned herself to miserable forebodings about the next stages of this seemingly bottomless pit of afflictions into which, by her own actions, she had plunged herself.

Her gargantuan host returned much later than he had the day before, and the reason for his lateness was apparent when he had Iziah - a third coloured boy who did the rough work and serviced his car - bring in a great pile of cardboard boxes. They contained at least a hundred pounds' worth of lingerie and as Mary inspected it, being human, she could not help feeling temporarily cheered up.

Confronted with this sort of thing she found it impossible to hate Wash wholeheartedly, and felt more than ever that, as he attracted her physically, she must endeavour to put all other thoughts about him out of her mind, and play up to him in the hope that when she had spent a few more nights with him he might relax his restriction on her leaving the house, or tire of her and send her back to London.

It was next day, Wednesday, that in the evening they talked for quite a while about the H-bomb and the chances of a Third World War. The subject arose through her having asked him what type of planes he had at his Station and his telling her that he commanded a squadron of giant bombers that could carry enough nuclear explosive in one mission to blow the whole of Moscow off the map.

'Should it ever have to be, let's hope they don't blow us off the map first,' she commented.

'No fear of that,' he asserted. 'Leastways, not unless some guy on their side goes crackers.'

'If you're right about that we've little need to fear an atomic war at all, then.'