Outside, in the corridor, he heard the echoing footsteps of a nun in clogs, coming back from the washrooms. And far away, hardly audible in the still equatorial evening, someone was playing a plaintive pipe. There was coughing from the next bed.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Collis. ‘I hardly know you.’

‘And I hardly know you. But it doesn’t matter.’

Again, there was silence between them. Then Collis said, ‘Father Xavier is outside. Shall I send him away?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you that I want to confess.’

‘I thought you wanted to confess your adulterous desire for me.’

‘Of course I do. But I can’t repent of it. Most of all, I want to confess that I married a man to spite my parents, that I perversely flew in the face of the Holy Catholic Church, and that I made a mockery of the sacrament of holy marriage. I want to confess that I was self-willed, and hypocritical, and that I took the love of God and the love of Our Lady for granted.’

Hannah was weeping now. Through the blurry gauze, Collis could see the sparkling tears on her cheeks. He could only sit back and watch, and listen, and feel the deepest grief he had ever felt in his life. This woman, this wife, should have been nothing to him, a passing stranger, a face on a train; and yet he had accepted responsibility for her happiness and her future and, ultimately, for her death. He was stricken with sadness, and he could only sit on his cheap wooden chair, watched by nuns, and hear what she had to say.

‘I want to confess that when I saw you, Collis, I fell in love with you. I had never known such a sensation. I was standing on the deck, and you raised your hat to me, and the feeling I had was so devastating that I couldn’t speak. Then I saw you again, when you came to introduce yourself, and what I felt then was indescribable. Mrs Edgeworth kept telling me to control myself, that I was infatuated, but I couldn’t think about anything or anybody else but you. Don’t you understand how difficult it was for me to turn you away, the night you came to my cabin? Don’t you understand how hurt I was when I saw you with that girl?’

She turned her face away from him. ‘I love you,’ she said miserably. ‘I love you so much, and now I have to die. All I have to confess is my disappointment in the Lord, that He would not spare me long enough to know you.’

‘Hannah,’ Collis said softly.

She turned back towards him, her face wet with tears. ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, God, I could have loved you.’

He nodded, wiping the tears from his own eyes with his fingers. ‘Hannah, I could have loved you, too.’