Everything was much smaller than she had remembered: in ten years, her childhood world had shrunk amazingly. The horse she could see through the window was a pigmy horse, nothing like the Irish farm horses when she was a child; the bed she lay in, unlike the vast double bed she had once shared with her brother, felt scarcely big enough to contain her. In those old days, the adult world and all that was in it had seemed to threaten and overwhelm; now it was a small world, a reassuring world of companionable things. Only occasionally – as when aircraft passed overhead, or summer thunder filled the sky – was she reminded that human beings might still revert to the stature of children.

To begin with, it was a happy time: learning to see, learning to hear, learning to speak again. She saw Mrs Bannister and Jack Lett nearly every day. They would come up to her room, together or alone, and talk to her: telling her of outside happenings, answering her eager questions. Gradually she was brought up-to-date with the missing time – and especially the last few years, when the successive triumphs had begun, and grown. She knew already what Mrs Bannister had done for her; but what Esther herself had been able to do for other people, the total love and faith she had called forth – these were new things she had never fully comprehended before, things that now made her proud and happy.

Yet there came a day when Mrs Bannister began to talk of less agreeable matters.

“All the work you used to do,” she said to Esther one evening, when they were alone together in the sitting room downstairs: “all the meetings, and the money we collected – they did such a lot of good for the blind.”

“Yes, you told me – and I’m glad,” said Esther happily. “But, you should be very proud, too. It was all your work, wasn’t it?”

“It was our work,” corrected Mrs Bannister. “Neither of us could have done anything without the other … It seems a terrible pity,” she went on, picking at the linen cover of her armchair, “that everything must come to a stop now. The blind will suffer, all over the world.”

She continued for some time in the same strain, persuasive yet never insistent, until Esther, feeling vaguely guilty, said: “But couldn’t we go on, in some way? Go on talking, and collecting money?”

Mrs Bannister shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same thing at all. In the old days, people came to the meetings and gave money, because you were so blind and helpless, and so clever at the same time. That was what reminded them of all the other blind people, and made them want to help. Now there’ll be no feeling like that left.”

Esther said nothing.

“Even the toys and games and dolls,” said Mrs Bannister, filling the pause, “will be no good now. Even the Club won’t make sense any more. The name Esther Costello won’t mean anything to anyone, as soon as people know that you can see and talk. It means the end of all that. I’m afraid Jack Lett will just have to fold up.”