She looked over her shoulder at him and gave him a wan smile. ‘By the time I reached San Francisco, after all those days on the Monterey, I wanted nothing from life but security and shelter. I didn’t want romantic adventure. I didn’t even want love. All I wanted was some place to lay down my head and rest; some place to be cared for and fed. I didn’t want to be told that I was beautiful. I didn’t want to be courted or impressed. I wanted ordinary days, and ordinary affection, and there was only one person I knew who could give me those things.’

‘It was all a flight of fancy, then, what happened in Panama?’ Collis said angrily. ‘You used me to assay your love for Walter, and perhaps to put your religious convictions to some kind of test that wouldn’t strain them too greatly? You used me to tickle your feminine sense of tragic drama?’

‘Collis, please—’

‘Please what? Please forget that I ever met you? Please forget that you ever stirred a passion within me that I never felt before, and which won’t let me alone? Hannah, I’ve been here in San Francisco, I’ve been out in Sacramento, I’ve been working hard and working fast. I’ve made money and I’ve made friends, all in the space of two months. But I’ve never been able to forget you, and I never will.’

She looked tired. ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ she said.

‘Tell me what you told me in Panama. Tell me that you won’t fail me.’

She gave a little ‘hmph’ of sad, amused resignation. ‘I know I said that,’ she said. ‘And I regret it.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Oh, but I do mean it, Collis, most desperately.’

He tried to pull her towards him, but she twisted her arm free. ‘How can you say that?’ he demanded. ‘After everything that happened in Panama, how can you say that?’

She was collected, and very cold. There was still something of the awkward, unrequited emotion in her that he had first sensed on the decks of the steamship Virginia; but it was certain that she had made up her mind about Collis, and that whatever he said, however much he pleaded or shouted or cajoled, he had lost her. He was beginning to wonder, now, why he had ever wanted her. She seemed so irritatingly dogmatic, so thin, so much like somebody else’s wife.

And yet there was something inside her that disturbed him deeply; something that evoked the same kind of strange, faraway feelings of destiny that the High Sierras had aroused. It was as if Hannah and only Hannah could help him to live the life that was waiting for him in San Francisco, and Sacramento, and across the deserts and mountains of America.

‘Was it really all a fake?’ he asked. ‘Everything you promised?’

‘No,’ she told him.

‘Then why this? Why didn’t you write? Even to tell me you didn’t love me any longer?’