were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as
if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had
converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim
and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long
home. All other scenes of earth--even that village of rural England,
where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her
mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago--were foreign to her,
in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and
galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

It might be, too,--doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret
from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart,
like a serpent from its hole,--it might be that another feeling kept
her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt,
there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in
a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before
the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a
joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the
tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and
laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized,
and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the
face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled
herself to believe--what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive
for continuing a resident of New England--was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her
guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so,
perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her
soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more
saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

[Illustration: The Lonesome Dwelling]

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any
other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been
built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it
was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put
it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the
habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin
of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A