"I want you to do more than listen," said Priscilla. She took one of his hands and held it in both of hers. "I want you to be Esther for the time being. I want you to judge me as Esther would judge me if she were here." "My God!" said the old man. "I cannot do that. I cannot look at you with her eyes." "Try to, won't you? Try to, very hard." "You move me, Priscilla. But tell me the story." "It implicates other people," said Priscilla--she sank back again in her seat--"and in telling you my share in it I must mention no names; but the facts are simply these. I have a great and very passionate love for learning. I am also ambitious. I was sent to Mrs Lyttelton's most excellent school by an uncle in the country. He could not very well afford to pay the fees of the school, and his intention was to remove me from it at the end of last term. I ought to tell you, perhaps, that I have a father in India; but he has married a second time and has a young family, and he is very poor. Uncle Josiah is my mother's brother, and he has always done what he could for me. But he is a rather rough, uneducated man; in short, he is a farmer in the south-west of England. Towards the end of the last term I received a letter from him saying that he could not afford to keep me at school any longer, and that I was to come back to him and either help my aunt in the house-work--which meant giving up my books and all my dreams of life--or that I was to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in the village. "Now both these prospects were equally odious to me. I struggled and fought against them. The suffering I endured was very keen and most real. Then, just when I was most miserable, there came a temptation. By the very post which brought me the dreadful letter from my uncle Josiah, there came a letter to another girl in the school who was most keenly desirous to leave it. I cannot mention the girl's name, but she was told that unless she won the first prize for literature at the break-up she was to remain for another year. You see, Mr Manchuri, this was the position. One girl wanted to go; another girl wanted to stay. Now I wanted to stay, oh! so tremendously, for another year at school would give me a chance which would almost have been a certainty of getting a big scholarship, which would have enabled me to go from Mrs Lyttelton's school to Girton or Newnham, and from there I could have continued my intellectual life and earned my bread honourably as a teacher." "This is quite interesting," said Mr Manchuri. "And what happened? You are still at school--at least, so you tell me." "Yes," said Priscilla, "I am still at school; I am there because I-- sinned." "How, child? Speak, Priscilla; speak."