‘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.

‘I’m afraid Mrs West is considerably worse,’ she said.

Collis set down his razor beside the china basin. He saw his face in the small rosewood-framed mirror on the wall, and his eyes were dark and worried. He saw his mouth say, ‘How long do you think she has left?’

‘I don’t know. The vómito negro has not begun yet. There is still a little hope.’

‘May I see her?’

‘She is very ill, Mr Edmonds. It would serve no purpose, and it would increase your own chances of catching it.’

‘I don’t want her to die alone, Sister Agnes.’

Sister Agnes touched her pale forehead as if she had a headache. ‘She isn’t alone, Mr Edmonds. Our Lady the Queen of Heaven is with her.’

Collis wiped his face with the small rough towel that the nuns had given him and picked up his shirt from the back of his chair. At least his linen was all freshly cleaned and pressed, now that the hospital laundry was taking care of it. But in the watery sunlight which shone through the open window of his cottage, he still looked tired and thin, and he would have done almost anything for a New York steak and fried onions, and twelve hours’ sleep in his own bed on Twenty-first Street.

‘Do you think she’ll last the week?’ he said.