They both cried, separated by the gauze screens. Not for what they had lost, nor for the times they had spent together, but for what might have been, and now would probably not be. They cried silently, in the gloom of Gethsemane Ward, with the dusk gathering in the gardens outside, and the nuns fluttering to and fro in the way that had earned them the name of ‘God’s geese’.

Eventually, Sister Agnes approached and laid her hand on Collis’s shoulder. ‘You must leave now, Mr Edmonds,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to risk infection any more than necessary. Gastritis can be very severe.’

‘Mrs West knows that she has yellow fever,’ Collis said. ‘You don’t have to keep up the pretence any longer.’

‘She knows?’

‘She overheard the nuns talking, that’s all.’

Sister Agnes looked towards Hannah, and Hannah nodded.

‘I see,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Then you know you are gravely at risk.’

Father Xavier came along the ward on his soft-soled shoes to stand a little way behind Sister Agnes, his eyebrows genuflecting towards the bridge of his nose, his beady eyes bright.

‘Have you renounced your thoughts for each other?’ he inquired.

Collis gave Hannah a last smile through the screens, and she managed a weak smile in return. He was pleased, for her sake, that she was religious, because at least she believed that when she left him she was going on to someplace better, where she would be cared for and contented. He couldn’t imagine what Hannah’s vision of heaven was like, but he was sure that it would, in some mystical way, include him.

‘No,’ Collis told Father Xavier. ‘We haven’t renounced them. Mrs West will tell you why.’

He waited at the Hospital of the Sacred Heart for three days. Most of the time he spent in his plain whitewashed cottage, writing letters to his father and his mother and his friends in New York on leaves of thin onion-skin paper which the sisters gave to him. He had a small desk with a view of the rear of the garden, and he would sit with his chin in his hand, staring out at the rows of plants as they nodded in the Pacific breeze, and at the grey clouds which rolled silently out of the south-east, day after day, and never broke.

He saw very little of Hannah. He understood she was worse, and that she was now suffering from the jaundice which had given yellow fever its name. Sometimes Sister Agnes would let him stand at the open door of the ward and look in, but all he could see through the isolation screens was the indistinct paleness of her face, and that told him nothing except that she was seriously ill.

On the morning of the fourth day, Sister Agnes came across the garden and knocked on his door. He was shaving with his hollow-ground razor and a cake of the hospital soap, which always smelled of cloves. Sister Agnes left the cottage door ajar because Collis was stripped to the waist, and she had no chaperone with her.