‘I have a marvellous idea,’ put in Collis, before he could start objecting. ‘Why don’t you give it to your wife, when she arrives here?’

‘My wife? Why should you want to give a workbox to my wife?’

‘I don’t, but now I’ve put you to all this trouble, gift-wrapping and so on, I don’t like to walk out without buying the box. Let me buy it, and you can give it your wife.’

‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Walter West, completely foxed. ‘But who shall I say gave it? She’ll know it wasn’t me.’

Collis thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I know. Tell her it came from an anonymous but adoring admirer.’

Walter West gazed down at the workbox in its pink tissue paper, and then at Collis, and his face didn’t look happy at all.

‘Go on,’ Collis said, ‘it’s just a joke. You can tell her what really happened later.’

Walter West, still frowning, opened up his cash register and counted out Collis’s change. Collis slipped the coins into his purse, raised his hat, and walked back out into the street without another word. He turned once he was on the boardwalk and squinted back into the shadowy doorway. There, on the counter, was the pink-wrapped box, and there, standing behind it, his eyebrows dense with thought, was the husband of the woman he thought he loved.

He walked on to the post office on Washington Street. Since the California had come in yesterday with sacks of mail from the East, the street outside was crowded with lines of men waiting to collect their letters. Here there was a mixture of men of all kinds, miners and drifters shuffling in line with banker’s clerks and auctioneers and servants from the big houses. Some of them talked and argued, and shook hands with acquaintances they may not have seen since the last mail steamer came in; others waited with their heads bowed, moving forward a step at a time to the pillared porch of the post office. A newsboy in a dirty shirt and bare feet walked along the lines selling copies of the Tribune. Collis joined the end of the line because he had nobody to wait for him.

It took him twenty minutes to get inside the post office, and it was a chaotic, disorganised, noisy scramble to reach the counter to collect his mail. The clerk, a blue pencil behind each prominent ear, quickly sorted through the E’s and found two letters addressed to Collis.

He pushed his way back outside. For no reason that he could think of, he found that he was trembling. He walked next door, to a grocery store called Garret House, and found a spare wooden chair on the boardwalk, where he sat down. A man in faded blue dungarees leaned against the open door of the store smoking a pipe and watching him with unabashed interest.