The fire was built up and a hot drink fetched. When the doctor arrived, although he was allowed upstairs to check on the woman first, he was soon retrieved and told firmly to patch Long together. When the re-snapped collarbone had been securely if excruciatingly strapped and Long's wet clothing replaced by ridiculously long but dry substitutes, a thick soup was brought, oddly flavoured but restorative. And at the end of it, a car arrived to take Long and Tom home, not a taxi, but commercial nonetheless.

“You're not to take any money from these people,” the blond man told the driver. Then he moved to the back window and took out a slim bill-fold.

“Sir, please,” Long protested. “I hope you are not offering me payment.”

The man hesitated, glanced briefly with his peculiar blue eyes at Tom's heavily worn, too-small shoes, and stood uncertainly, slapping the bill-fold against his hand. “You saved my wife's life.”

“As you would have done for mine,” Long replied firmly.

The look the two men exchanged seemed to go on a long time, and said a great deal. Would this tall, beautifully dressed white man have thrown himself into the waves after the wife of the short Chinese man with the much-mended trousers? Most would not. But this one?

In the end, the man slid the bill-fold away into his breast pocket, and held out a hand to Long.

“Thank you,” he said. And then he closed the door of the car, which negotiated the streets from the heights to Chinatown. The driver stopped before the greengrocer's, even getting out to hold the door for them as if they were white, or rich. A very worried Mah bustled onto the pavement, coming to a dead halt at the sight of the uniformed driver. The man tipped his hat to her, got into his vehicle, and drove away before Long could search his pockets for a tip.

The next afternoon, while Tom was off with a delivery for the grocer's and Mah was scrubbing shirts at the laundry down the street, there came a knock at the door of the apartment. Long, who had ached all day as if all his broken bones had come to pieces instead of just the one, laboriously got to his feet and answered it. The blond man filled the door-way.

“The driver gave me your address,” he said to Long. “How's the shoulder?”

“It is nothing.”

“The doctor said you'd broken it last summer, along with a couple other bones.”

“That is true. They healed, this will too. I trust your wife is well?”

“She's fine, thanks to you.” He simply stood there, leaving Long no option but to invite him in. The house, as always, was spotless, but having sat on the man's leather sofa and drunk soup from the man's gold-rimmed bowls, Long knew that the man would see nothing but the poverty.