“Have you got the ten dollars ready?”

“Yes. We’ll give it at the end.”

There was a vast sigh over the whole hall, growing and dying like the mutter of a storm a hundred miles away.

“Here she is.”

“Ah …”

At the end of an hour, Mrs Bannister still held her audience as if in chains. The single tall figure in the centre of the platform was the focus of an unwavering, hypnotic concentration: there was scarcely a movement in the hall, scarcely a cough, never a whisper. Everything about Mrs Bannister aided this spell. She was dressed from head to foot in black: below the pale face, a black cape like a monk’s, with a cowl at the shoulders, reached to the floor. She had a priestly air; and her voice had the same quality – insistent, commanding, certain of attention and belief.

“I have lost the dearest friend of my life, the dearest child,” she said. Her motionless figure never wavered, never surrendered to grief; but the grief was in her voice and eyes, flowing down to the audience like an enveloping mist. “What you have lost is something different. You have lost Esther Costello – a symbol of the whole handicapped world, the centre of a great charitable enterprise. Here in this town, her own town of Boston, she had a special place. And I like to think that she had a special place in your hearts as well. In fact, I know she had that place, because of what you have done to help the helpless, because of what you gave to Esther during the past months and years, to pass on to other blind people.

“Now she has gone – this girl whom we loved so much, this poor child who touched all our hearts because she was so afflicted, who died because of that affliction – this girl who lost everything.”

By God, that was true! thought Harry Grant, half-enthralled, half-sickened by what he heard. Esther had lost everything: she had lost more than anyone in this whole audience, save himself, would ever know. She had lost speech, sight, and hearing; virginity, honour, and her own will. At the end, there had only been her life … The charmed, moving, useless phrases began to slide into his brain, creeping from the air, rustling like spiders: the phrases which he would never now set down, and which must go to waste even as they formed tormentingly within his mind.

“Because Esther is dead,” said Mrs Bannister, gathering the last threads, knitting the audience, and their generous grief, and the sombre evening together, feeling towards the certain climax, “we must make up our minds that nothing else must die. Because she is dead, we who are left behind must never stop carrying on her work. I gave up many years and much time to Esther – and I gave them gladly, willingly, because she was a wonderful child, and the work we were able to do together, by God’s grace, was wonderful also. That work must go on … You all know that this is a memorial meeting, the first of many such meetings all over the United States, all over the world. There are thousands of people in every country, waiting to hear about Esther, waiting to give their help towards what she stood for. I would like to see, as a result of these meetings, a temple for the blind and afflicted” – Mrs Bannister seemed to correct herself – “a great chain of temples, girdling the earth, caring for those who cannot care for themselves, carrying Esther’s message of hope and love to the farthest corners of the world.