e that day, no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and
waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart!
Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living
death; and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely
acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be
true!"

"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger, pointed
at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a
dungeon,--thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"

"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.

"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth again. "I
tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned
from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this
miserable priest! But for my aid, his life would have burned away in
torments, within the first two years after the perpetration of his
crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that
could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet
letter. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough! What art can
do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes, and creeps about on
earth, is owing all to me!"

"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.

"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth,
letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better
had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has
suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been
conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him
like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,--for the Creator never
made another being so sensitive as this,--he knew that no friendly
hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking
curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew
not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to
his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be
tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of
remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him
beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!--the
closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!--and
who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst
revenge! Yea, indeed!--he did not err!--there was a