Sister Agnes came across to him and raised her hands before him, without touching him, but as if she were blessing him, or bestowing on him some traditional and tender grace. Their eyes met, and there was a complicated exchange of feelings between them which neither of them could completely interpret. It had mainly to do with sympathy and with understanding, but it also involved apprehension, and affection, and with the mutual mysteries of a woman who could be pretty and yet celibate, and a man who could have a conscience and yet be adulterous.

Sister Agnes went to the wall and rang a small bell.

‘Anthony will show you the cottage,’ she said. ‘I hope you will be comfortable. I hope, too, that the Lord will keep you safe.’

Collis had almost forgotten his exposure to yellow fever. He looked towards the double oak doors with their heavy Spanish locks and hinges, and it occurred to him that he might never walk through them again.

At about seven o’clock, when the evening air was a curious grainy blue, there was a rap at his door. He had been stretched out on his rigid bed, his hands under his head, thinking about Hannah and San Francisco and Sister Agnes, while the mosquitoes danced around his lamp, and painted statuettes of the Virgin Mary and the disciples regarded him silently from small wooden plinths on the whitewashed walls. Barefoot, but still dressed, he padded across the tiled floor, opened the cottage door, and said, ‘It’s time?’

‘Si, señor,’ replied Anthony, the Jamaican handy-man. ‘Father Xavier, he come right now.’

Collis laced up his shoes, put on his light-grey coat, and followed Anthony through the garden. The sun had gone down only a few minutes ago, and the moon would soon be up. The garden, with its neat rows of plants and flower-beds, appeared in the twilight like a dream from the Arabian Nights. Each plant was set in a pottery bowl filled with water, to prevent the umbrella ants from devouring it, and around each bowl of water a small cloud of mosquitoes swarmed. One or two eccentric professors had tried to suggest that the mosquitoes themselves were carriers of disease, but experienced Panama hands knew that it was the warm south-east winds, and the damp, which spread the fever.

Father Xavier was waiting with Sister Agnes in the corridor outside Gethsemane Ward. He, too, was a Belgian — a small man with a spherical head, permanently astonished eyes, and eyebrows that seemed to be independently choreographed, so that when he expressed concern, or interest, they would each break into a little dance of their own. He was very clean, and his scalp was shaved so that it was prickly, and he wore a dove-grey cassock, with a plain silver cross. He spoke precise English, so precise that he must have learned it at an English theological college.