y life?"

She laughed, while speaking thus. But, in truth, as my eyes wandered
from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an
artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate
holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft; in Zenobia,
the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair
enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own; and, in
Priscilla, the pale victim, whose soul and body had been wasted by her
spells. Had a pile of fagots been heaped against the rock, this hint
of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture.

"It was too hard upon me," continued Zenobia, addressing Hollingsworth,
"that judge, jury, and accuser should all be comprehended in one man!
I demur, as I think the lawyers say, to the jurisdiction. But let the
learned Judge Coverdale seat himself on the top of the rock, and you
and me stand at its base, side by side, pleading our cause before him!
There might, at least, be two criminals instead of one."

"You forced this on me," replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in
the face. "Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder?
Do I assume to be your judge? No; except so far as I have an
unquestionable right of judgment, in order to settle my own line of
behavior towards those with whom the events of life bring me in
contact. True, I have already judged you, but not on the world's
part,--neither do I pretend to pass a sentence!"

"Ah, this is very good!" cried Zenobia with a smile. "What strange
beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale!--is it not so? It is the simplest
thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret
tribunals, and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go
free without a sentence. The misfortune is, that this same secret
tribunal chances to be the only judgment-seat that a true woman stands
in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is equivalent to a
death sentence!"

The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my
impression that a crisis had just come and gone. On Hollingsworth's
brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his
own will was the instrument. In Zenobia's whole person, beholding her
more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious
disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished
one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and l