And she clutched Mrs Bannister’s hand as if it were a priest’s hand holding the sacrament, as if the two of them were lovers.

For Mrs Bannister, it was moments like these – as time went on, there was an increasing number of them – that seemed at one stroke to wipe away all her besetting worries, all the drudgery of nursing and housekeeping for so handicapped a human as Esther, all the wearisome job of learning deaf-and-dumb speech, and becoming, at the age of forty-five, a backward schoolgirl again. At the Institute, where the two of them had been under instruction, side by side, for so many months, they were proud of Esther – and of Mrs Bannister too. But they were proud of Mrs Bannister in a different way: to them, while Esther was a pretty prodigy, Mrs Bannister was a paragon of generosity and compassion. They were sincere, religious-minded people, with a sense of mission: the whole Institute, indeed, was a model of piety as well as efficiency: and the sort of thing that Mrs Bannister was doing for Esther had, for them, a saint-like quality which exactly matched their own instincts.

“One day,” they used to say to her, “you’ll have a great reward for what you’re doing.”

“I hope so,” Mrs Bannister would say laughingly. “I surely hope so.”

They meant, clearly, that any reward that came her way was likely to be in Heaven. Mrs Bannister was not entirely sure that this was what she meant herself.

When it was spring once more, and warm, Esther and Mrs Bannister tried the outside world again.

Hitherto, they had been very little out of doors: to keep them occupied, there had been the hours of study at the Institute, and then the crisp cold of a Boston winter, and the attraction of the Commonwealth Avenue apartment – an enclosed citadel that gave them comfort, and freedom from the difficulty of coping with the demands of the normal world. But now it was April, and the time of invitation: the spring air, and the trees along the Avenue, and the sunshine, all beckoned them to step outside their retreat – and when they did so, the outside was not difficult at all.

Mrs Bannister had feared all kinds of embarrassment when she took Esther out in public, but there turned out to be no complications of any sort. To the casual eye, the girl looked normal, and she now walked surely and calmly, with the minimum of guidance. People sometimes stared, of course, but it was a friendly stare, not a critical or a malicious one; and Mrs Bannister, who had been afraid that she might seem to be part of a freak show, found that the world accepted them as natural elements within itself.

The two of them went shopping: they went out in a motor boat on the Charles River: they walked in the sunshine, or sat under the trees on Boston Common. This last was what Esther seemed to enjoy, above all else. She was content to sit for hours on one of the smooth wooden benches halfway up the hill, her face turned towards the warm breeze that blew in from the sea, her young body stretched at ease, her right hand clasped in Mrs Bannister’s, or flickering as her fingers ‘talked’. Often she and Mrs Bannister fed the pigeons, and there was always a special joy in Esther’s face when she could coax one of the birds to perch on her shoulder or her wrist, or even, as sometimes happened, to lie still under the stroking of her gentle hand.