There! I have wiped them away now, and can go on again properly.
I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very diligent.
One sunny afternoon, when I had come home from school with my books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was gliding up-stairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the parlour-door, and called me back. Sitting with her, I found – which was very unusual indeed – a stranger. A portly important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon his little finger.
'This,' said my godmother in an under-tone, 'is the child.' Then she said, in her naturally stern way of speaking, 'This is Esther, sir.'
The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me, and said, 'Come here, my dear!' He shook hands with me, and asked me to take off my bonnet – looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, 'Ah!' and afterwards 'Yes!' And then, taking off his eye-glasses, and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, 'You may go up-stairs, Esther!' and I made him my curtsey 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!"'