Esther watched for a long moment: then she walked over, took a handkerchief from her breast, and wiped the child’s face, with so much tenderness and care in her hands and eyes that it was obvious to everyone watching that she could see exactly what she was doing.

Both the photographers had wandered off: Mrs Bannister retrieved the fearful moment by stepping forward, putting her arm round Esther, and recalling her to her proper world again. But the ring of black faces reflected an undisguised amazement, at what could only be a miracle. Whispering broke out; absurdly, there was some clapping: an old man in the crowd came forward, hat in hand, and greeted her ceremoniously in Zulu as Inkosazana – Little Princess.

Mrs Bannister smiled vaguely, and began to lead Esther towards the waiting car again. One of the Press photographers came up.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Is she OK?”

“It’s the sun,” answered Mrs Bannister. “I’m afraid it’s a bit too strong for her.”

“Better take her indoors,” said the man, sympathetically. “We’re high up here, you know – six thousand feet. That, and the sun, can get you unless you’re careful.” He shut the car door after them; then he became aware of the excitement among the negroes at his back, and he turned, while Mrs Bannister’s taxi began to gather way and make for the location entrance. “What the hell?” he asked curtly, of the man nearest to him. “What’s all the uproar?”

After a moment, the man said, respectfully: “She can see, Baas.”

“Nuts!” said the photographer. “She can’t see – that’s what it’s all about … Dumb bloody kaffirs!” he said, shouldering his way towards his own car. “Trust them to get the thing upside down.” And to his driver: “Let’s get to hell out of this place! It always depresses me.”

There could be no consequences to so ill-attested a mishap: in a sense, there had been no witnesses to it at all, and the occasion died as soon as it was born, on the malodorous breeze that hung and wavered above the township. Soon afterward, their party moved on to Cape Town, en route for Canada and the States, and the tour resumed its triumph – and, for Esther, its fearful ordeal. She had no friend to talk to, no one in whom to confide: she bore it all alone, drilled into total submission, earning thanks and plaudits by a performance always fraudulent, watched from morning till nightfall not only by huge throngs of strangers, but by those near her who loved her so dearly …

The hundreds of crowded miles, the thousands of clamant people, unwound before and after her, completing the blank spaces of a pattern foredoomed to success. There were no more slips, no more incidents save the expected, acceptable ones, the ones that fell within the world-tour routine, suiting the newsreels, delighting the Press. There was the small child at Cape Town that refused to surrender its bouquet; the young man in Quebec who tried to climb into her room – ‘to offer her a donation’, the papers quickly added; the old lady in Chicago who handed over to Esther her entire life savings, crammed into a much-photographed stocking.