kled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid
themselves."

"These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with
somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with
his forefinger. "They fear to take up the shame that rightfully
belongs to them. Their love for man, their zeal for God's
service,--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts
with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and
which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they
seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands!
If they would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making
manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to
penitential self-abasement! Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise
and pious friend, that a false show can be better--can be more for
God's glory, or man's welfare--than God's own truth? Trust me, such
men deceive themselves!"

"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a
ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his
too sensitive and nervous temperament.--"But, now, I would ask of my
well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have
profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild
laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent
burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window,--for it was
summer-time,--the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl
passing along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked
as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse
merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely
out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad,
flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy,--perhaps of Isaac
Johnson himself,--she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's
command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little
Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which
grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them
along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal
bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered.
Hester did not