d
have been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she
had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand,
and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt
into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger
Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the
time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy
herself happy by his side.

"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. "He
betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with
it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable
fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch
than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be
reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness,
which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester
ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken?
Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter,
inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance?

The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise
have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"

[Illustration: Pearl on the Sea-Shore]

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for
amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At
first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image
in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined
to venture--seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of
impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that
either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better
pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them
with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than
any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered
near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made
prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in
the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked