But while he waited, Grant pondered on what Ryan had just said. It was partly true, of course – he wasn’t a tough reporter, he did feel for the people he was writing about, he did suffer for the betrayed, bleed with the murdered, strut with the triumphant. He wasn’t tough, and he didn’t try to be; instead, he reported with the heart. But he did report, with accuracy as well as feeling – that much, he was still sure of, and he thought Ryan was sure of it too. After all, Ryan had kept him on the Star-Telegram for more than four years …

Ryan was near the end of the copy now: the picture of the amazing rescue of Esther Costello, the story of faith, love, and compassion actively at work, should be nearly complete in his mind. But now he read in silence, frowning horribly, occasionally drawing in his breath with a hiss. It sounded like surprise, derision, pain – anything but appreciation. Grant wished he’d written the story straight, instead of trying to persuade and to moralize. He didn’t think Ryan would print it, after all. There was a spike on one corner of Ryan’s desk: a spike that was cleared every morning, to reveal, printed on its base-plate, the one word ‘NO’. That was where his story was going to finish up.

“‘This is, for each one of us, a ringing challenge’,” quoted Ryan unexpectedly, in the same lemon-skin voice. “Which reminds me, I haven’t paid my telephone account.”

Grant flushed again. “All right – take it out.”

“No. I like it. Or rather, I don’t like it, which means that thousands will.”

Grant felt his heart jump, on the instant. “Then you will run it?”

“Sure.” The news editor looked up suddenly, and grinned. “Relax, Harry. It’s OK. It’s good. Get some pictures as well.”

The piece that the Star-Telegram carried two days later, under the first-time byline ‘by Harry Grant’, was, in its own way, a minor classic of newspaper writing. True, it was not straight reporting, or anything like it; it took sides, it demanded sympathy, it aimed straight at the American heart. But as a story, it was a triumph, exhibiting brilliantly the two elements in Esther Costello’s progress so far – the small miracle that had allowed her to live with the outside world again, and the major personal undertaking that was Mrs Bannister’s part in it.

It was all there, as Grant himself had said – the first shattering disappointment, the slow reversal of fate, the necessary love and faith, the twin emergence of Esther as the prize pupil and Mrs Bannister as the caretaker of her sanity and hope. It was further limelit by three photographs which, by luck or skill, caught exactly Esther’s young beauty, Mrs Bannister’s handsome competence, and their hard-won joint communion. Especially did the last picture, which showed Esther, open-eyed and mouthed, reacting like an unfolded flower to something which Mrs Bannister had spelled out to her, point the whole theme of Harry Grant’s story – that one human can do for another what Christ Himself might be glad to admire.