‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He rubbed at his mouth with his hand.

‘I don’t know what else to say to you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to write. I suppose I was afraid of you. I don’t know.’

They stood side by side on the foggy street corner for whole minutes, while passers-by nudged past them, businessmen and shoppers and Chilean dock-workers in blue wool coats, and wagons clattered across the rutted junction.

‘Was, uh, Walter happy to see you?’ asked Collis.

She nodded. Tears suddenly brimmed in her eyes and clung to her lashes.

‘Well,’ said Collis, ‘I can guess that he was.’

He let out a tight breath and tried to smile. ‘I guess I was just infatuated,’ he told her. ‘It shouldn’t take me too long to get over you. I’m pretty busy right now. They made me partner in a hardware store out at Sacramento, fifteen per cent partner. There’s more to do than any one man can cope with. Buying, selling. That kind of thing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

He reached out and gently touched her chin. ‘You shouldn’t be,’ he said, in his softest voice. ‘Whatever happened wasn’t your fault. Whatever brought us together finishes here. It has to.’

He took her hand, held it between the palms of his own hands, and it was cold and thin, the hand of a woman whose love has almost died. She let out three or four muted noises of grief, and he felt his own eyes wet with desolation and disappointment.

The clock on the Mercantile Library Building struck eleven, sonorous and endless, and the chimes fell into the fog like the anchors of eleven abandoned ships.

‘I think I’d better go,’ Collis said.

She watched him cross Bush Street; and as he did so, a horse-drawn steamer from Engine Company Number Two on Kearny Street came jangling and clattering through the fog on its way to a fire on Market. Its three grey horses splattered through the mud, their nostrils fuming, and the highly polished brass steamer bounced after them, the fireman sitting upright and aloof in his cap and buttoned-up jacket.

By the time the steamer had passed by, Collis had disappeared into the crowds on the sidewalk, and Hannah could do nothing else but walk along Montgomery on her own, as far as the New Era German Bakery, where she waited in line at the marble-topped counter, amid the chatter of people taking tea and pumpernickel, and the crusty aroma of fresh-baked loaves, her eyes dry but vacant, and her hands clutched in front of her, holding her purse in a gesture that was both self-protective and pathetic.

The German girl behind the counter had to ask her what she wanted twice to get her attention.