Collis listened to this without changing his expression. It was all exactly as he feared it would be. Hannah would arrive in San Francisco, and this bearded haberdasher’s dogged lonesomeness and patent need would make it impossible for her to break free from him. After all the strange conversations in Panama, after all the veiled promises and protestations of profane love, his affair with Hannah amounted to no more than this store, with its silks and its threads, and this dull man behind the glass counter. It all weighed too much, in the scales of Christianity and guilt, and all that Collis had to counterbalance it with was gossamer.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Collis said suddenly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Walter West asked him. ‘What about?’

‘About the workbox. I don’t think my niece will really like it after all.’

‘Well …’ said Walter West, hesitantly.

‘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.