CHAPTER XXII.

The Minister in Amaze.

As the minister departed in advance of Hester Prynne in Little Pearl, he threw a backward

glance, half expecting that he should discover only some faintly traced features or outline

of the mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods.

So great of a sissitude in his life could not at once be received as real.

But there was Hester, clad in her grey robe, still standing beside the tree trunk, which

some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, in which time had ever since been covering

with moss, so that these two faded ones, with earth's heaviest burden on them, might there

sit down together, and find a single hour's rest and solace.

And there was Pearl too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook, now that the intrusive

third person was gone, and taking her old place by her mother's side.

So the minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed.

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it

with a strange disquietude, he recalled, and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester

and himself had sketched for their departure.

He had been determined between them that the old world, with its crowds and cities, offered

them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England, or all America,

with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered

thinly along the seaboard.

Not to speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest

life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home

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