ild.

"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister,--and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth
impelled him to answer the child so. "Then, and there, before the
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But
the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!"

Pearl laughed again.

[Illustration: "They stood in the noon of that strange splendor"]

But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud
betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome
of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with
the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is
always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The
wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the
doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about
them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the
wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with
green on either side;--all were visible, but with a singularity of
aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things
of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the
embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself
a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the
noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that
is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who
belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes, and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its
expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.
Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his
hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many
revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a