n his iron arm--had held her up, through
the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended
walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom; and she must either
sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,
or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help
her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial
with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own
trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to
be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with
the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never
to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile
up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up
her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the
young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter
flaming on her breast,--at her, the child of honorable parents,--at
her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,--at her,
who had once been innocent,--as the figure, the body, the reality of
sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would
be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her,--kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the
Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure,--free to return to her
birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her
character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if
emerging into another state of being,--and having also the passes of
the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her
nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life
were alien from the law that had condemned her,--it may seem
marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home,
where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there
is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has
the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to
linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more
irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her
ignominy,