one, Hester!"

"Thou shalt not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.

Then, all was spoken!

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XVIII.

A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE.

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for
so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the
untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a
colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely
as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from
this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever
priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly
more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared
not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers,--stern and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but
taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one
of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had
watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,--for those it
was easy to arrange,--but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that
day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its
principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his
order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensi