Mrs Bannister crossed the cabin floor, and laid her hand gently on Esther’s forehead. The girl started, as she always did when she was touched suddenly, and then her brow relaxed and she smiled, and put up her own hand to cover the visiting one.

“Only one more night, honey,” said Mrs Bannister. “Then we’ll get you right, for sure.”

Every mile the ship made westwards, every turn of the screw, seemed to be bringing them nearer to sanity and hope.

There was one more item in the voyage, and it was added the same night, when Mrs Bannister left Esther and returned to the saloon. There, the last ship’s concert was just getting underway; and after it, at the suggestion of the old senator (who made a speech in which the words ‘little lady’ occurred eleven times), a collection was taken for Esther Costello. It was, in the senator’s phrase, “to help the little lady in her sore trouble”.

The takings were handed to Mrs Bannister, by the purser, when she was squaring her bar account next morning.

They totalled seventeen hundred dollars.

Chapter Five

The New York papers picked up the scent very quickly. Mrs Bannister had hardly reached the hotel overlooking Central Park, ordered coffee, and put Esther to bed, before two reporters and a photographer were hammering at the door, in search of the story they were later to headline as ‘Stricken Colleen Seeks Sight, Hearing, Speech’. Mrs Bannister, whose home for thirty years had been Boston, had never cared for New York until this moment. But so ready was its welcome, and so flattering its notice, that she found herself warming to it immediately.

She was lucky in the moment of her arrival, since a dearth of news had left a margin of public interest to spare. But the story itself was so good, and Esther Costello, in the first photograph ever taken of her, looked the part so completely – young, pretty, and forlorn – that there was a swift and impressive follow-up. In particular, large numbers of women reporters, eager to jerk their quota of tears from the promising facts, climbed in with a will. Their variants on the theme – one of which achieved brief notoriety, being couched in the form of an advertisement under the flaring headline ‘Young Girl Wants Two of Everything’ – ensured that within a few days most people in New York knew the story, and speculated on its next development.

Of this, Mrs Bannister was not sure. She had visualized a couple of days in New York, and then the journey home – home to Boston, where there were friends to welcome her, and doctors to take Esther in hand. In the end, she stayed a fortnight. She did not put Esther under treatment, since this might have prolonged their stay indefinitely; instead, the time was passed agreeably in shopping and in newspaper interviews. Telegrams from two friends in Boston indicated that the news had been picked up there, and that the same sort of welcome awaited her in her home town. But it gave her, besides the first feeling of satisfaction, a small twinge of doubt. This part of the adventure was fine. But what if there were an anticlimax, what if Esther proved to be beyond medical aid? How would the papers play that one?