Then they taught her the four letters of the word ‘fire’, using the normal deaf-and-dumb sign language on her fingers and palm.

To ‘fire’ they presently added ‘water’ – dipping her hand in a bowl of water, giving five taps, and then going on to the individual letters themselves. The fact that ‘fire’ and ‘water’ had two letters in common, ‘r’ and ‘e’, seemed to give Esther tremendous pleasure … Next came the word ‘mouth’, and thus they had, with these three simple words, taught her eleven different letters, including all the five vowels.

These eleven letters took nearly a third of a year to communicate. But after that, progress was a good deal quicker.

Mrs Bannister learned at the same time, and soon it was she, and she only, who spelled out letters and words on Esther’s hand, so that the girl could get used to her touch and they could establish the essential sympathy. They spent hours together, whispering, tapping, pressing the shape of letters on to each other’s hands. They learned ‘leg’ and ‘neck’, ‘face’ and ‘back’: they learned ‘chair’ and ‘table’ and ‘bed’: they moved on to sentences – ‘I am hungry’, ‘I want to drink’, ‘It is time to go to bed’. It soon became clear that Esther was a girl of quick intelligence, and quick humour too: she was seizing on this child’s guessing-game, which was so enormously important to her, because it satisfied many things within her – not only her hunger for the outside world, but the lively spirit she had left so far behind. Sometimes she would touch Mrs Bannister’s arm, and spell ‘leg’, or say ‘fire’ for ‘water’; Mrs Bannister would grow puzzled and depressed, until a smile on Esther’s face told her that the girl was doing it on purpose, that this was the kind of joke with which she had teased other children, five years ago at the age of ten, and she hoped it might still be funny … Whenever this happened, it brought Mrs Bannister to the edge of tears. The idea that this child could, from her total darkness, conjure up a joke to amuse other people, seemed as wonderful and as touching as birth itself.

There came a day when Mrs Bannister told Esther what had happened to her in the past.

She had been warned, both by the doctors and by the institute where she and Esther were originally trained, that she was not to do this. They all seemed to have the fixed idea that to explain the causes of Esther’s present ruin would shock her, and increase her melancholy beyond a tolerable limit. But surely, thought Mrs Bannister, Esther had had enough recent shocks to toughen her for life, and there was no melancholy to be increased – the girl was, in fact, now far more cheerful than half a dozen dreary doctors … She might still have obeyed the warning, had not Esther brought the subject up herself. But when this happened, in a moving phrase which remained with her for long afterwards, Mrs Bannister made up her mind to take the chance.