Much heartened, and with an interested look on his face, Jack Lett, who was nearest to her, reached out and tapped Esther on the arm. Her start of surprise and shy confusion was as good as anything they remembered from earlier, happier days.

Mrs Bannister turned to Dr Worthington. “Congratulations, Doctor,” she said warmly. “You’ve done a fine job … I don’t see that we need to worry over anything.”

On that long tour, covering thousands of miles and scores of crowded meetings, Esther really did very well. It was true that all her audiences were uniformly on her side, and had come there especially to acclaim her; but they were sharp-eyed human beings as well as disciples, and they would have been quick to notice anything odd or suspicious in what she or Mrs Bannister did. Esther must have been stared at, examined, appraised, touched, watched, and hailed by a quarter of a million people, in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the United States; she had to appear on platforms, at parties, on balconies, in the streets, at missions and institutions and schools; she had to give a flawless public performance, without respite, for six months on end.

In the whole of this time, with all its dangers and crises and chances of disaster, she made only two discernible slips.

The first was in Christchurch, New Zealand. There, she was received privately by the Archbishop, and afterwards, accompanied by His Grace, she faced an audience of four hundred schoolchildren and a battery of Press cameramen. The hall in which she appeared was somewhat gloomy: the flashguns, when they exploded in quick succession, had therefore an unexpected and dazzling brilliance.

This may have taken her by surprise: or it may have frightened her; or it may have been too much for Dr Worthington’s strange lenses. But a photograph in the Christchurch Courier next day showed Esther with her hand on a small child’s head, and her eyes tightly shut.

The occasion had been religious. “She must have been praying,” said the more devout readers. “How very sweet.”

“You know,” said the man who took the photograph, later, “if it wasn’t a silly idea, I’d say that she was waiting for my flashgun, and she blinked.”

The second mistake was more serious, because it involved a definite, observed action on Esther’s part, which could only be explained by the fact that she could see perfectly well. But luckily it took place in South Africa, and the only witnesses were confused and inarticulate negroes whom no one treated seriously in any case.

The party was staying in Johannesburg: it was the day after a huge meeting in the City Hall, at which Esther’s lovely face and flawless performance had worked their usual magic. The richest city in the southern hemisphere had lived up to its other, less publicized reputation – that of being the warmest-hearted also: the collection after the meeting made even Jack Lett blink, and the promises of support for the future were a golden guarantee of success. But the morrow found Mrs Bannister and Esther in a very different milieu – one of the miserable shanty town locations outside the city, where sixty-five thousand negroes lived in an atmosphere of disease, squalor, filth, and crime not easily matched anywhere in the world.