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 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.

The gentleman put on his glasses to look at me and said, "Come here, my dear!" He shook hands and asked me to take off my bonnet. "Ah!" he said; "Yes!" And he gave my godmother a nod.
My godmother said, "You may go upstairs, Esther!" And I curtsied 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 had come down at nine o'clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading aloud from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.
