ger Chillingworth, going on, in an
unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption,--but standing up,
and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his
low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a sickness, a sore place, if we may
so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate
manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your
physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first lay
open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?"

"No!--not to thee!--not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr.
Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and
with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. "Not to thee!
But if it be the soul's disease, then do I commit myself to the one
Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with his good pleasure, can
cure; or he can kill! Let him do with me as, in his justice and
wisdom, he shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this
matter?--that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?"

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth to
himself, looking after the minister with a grave smile. "There is
nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how
passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As
with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing erenow,
this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!"

[Illustration: The Leech and his Patient]

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore.
The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that
the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak
of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician's words to
excuse or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which
he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice
which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had
expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care, which, if not successful in restoring him to
health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging his
feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented,
and went on with his medical supervision of the minister; d