He left the ward and walked back across the garden. He paused at the door of his cottage, and looked up, and suddenly realised the stars were out. The humid clouds which had oppressed Panama City for the past week had at last passed over. He wondered whether it was a good omen, or whether it would simply make it easier for Hannah’s spirit to rise and join the angels she had always been so unhappy without.

In the morning, at ten, she was no better. He waited in the corridor outside Gethsemane Ward for a while, but Sister Agnes wouldn’t let him in. The fever was reaching crisis point. He went back to his cottage and drank the last of a bottle of Spanish wine which Anthony had brought up from the city for him. There wasn’t even enough to get drunk on.

That afternoon, after a lunch of steamed fish and rice, he was driven in the donkey trap down to the offices of the United States Mail Steamship Company, where his ticket for sailing on to San Francisco was endorsed. The California was due to sail out of Panama City at seven on Monday morning, and make her way back up the coast, with stops at Tehuantepec, Guadalajara, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. In the high-ceilinged office with its marble counters and clustered flypapers, Collis had to present a letter to the blue-uniformed Panamanian behind the desk, certifying that he had been kept in isolation after his exposure to fiebre amarilla, and that he was now considered by the sisters of the Hospital of the Sacred Heart to be free of infection. The Panamanian read the letter slowly, tracing each word with the tip of his pencil, and pausing every now and then to regard Collis, with deep mistrust. Finally, he stamped Collis’s ticket, and returned the letter, folded, on the end of his letter opener, lest he catch some disease through touching it.

Collis left the office and climbed back into the donkey trap. The Spanish boy clicked his tongue, and they rattled off through the streets. They climbed the Avenida Central to the wide, rubbish-strewn Cathedral Plaza, under the shadow of the twin brownstone towers, where priests hurried as if Panama were about to sink into the sea, and old men sat and smoked cigars as if they didn’t care if it did. The sun touched the spire of one of the towers and gave it a dazzling halo.

Collis said to the donkey-trap boy: ‘Stop here for a moment, will you?’

The boy, without a word, obeyed, and the trap came to a halt. Collis, his eyes still on the cathedral, climbed out and walked across the plaza. He went up the steps and through the open doors into the musty interior.