looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, “Ah!” and afterwards “Yes!” And then, taking off his eyeglasses and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his armchair, turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, “You may go upstairs, Esther!” And I made him my curtsy and left him.
It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o’clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.
“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!’ ”
I was stopped by my godmother’s rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of the book, “ ‘Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!’ ”
In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had sounded through the house and been heard in the street.
She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened.