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After a slight pause, Hester continued "Sophia was very positive about its being impossible that our visitor could have any business with you was not she?" "Oh, Hester!" said Margaret, imploringly, with her eyes full of tears. "Well, well," said Hester, remembering how cruel this speech might appear to her sister, "I ought not to speak to you from my own habitual disbelief of Mrs Rowland's news.
Though very miserable, Hester was very brave. In the presence of her husband she would never allow herself to seem to doubt. She would speak of their marriage as a thing so holy that nothing within the power of man could disturb it. Of course they were man and wife, and of course the truth would at last prevail. Was not the Lord able, in His own good time, to set all these matters right?
He might be a woman-eater, and after her money if she had any: such suspects must be watched and followed, and their haunts marked. "But," said Hester, fearing the conversation might here take a dangerous turn, "I should like to understand the thing a little better. I am not willing to set myself down as a coward; I do not see that a woman has any right to be a coward any more than a man.
"But certainly," insisted Hester, "without taking the pains necessary to know for themselves the characters of those to whom they trust the children God has given to their charge; whereas to abandon them to the care of angels themselves would be to go against the laws of nature and the calling of God."
Hamilton had failed; that his house and farm were sold, and that he, overwhelmed with mortification both at his failure and the opposition of his friends to his last marriage, had died suddenly, leaving Hester with no home in the wide world unless Madam Conway received her again into her family.
Instead of so doing, he sent word to Major Hester that no gift, save that of his life's blood, would ever atone for the insult of that kick, nor wipe out the enmity between them. "So be it, then, if he will have it so," replied the soldier, with a light laugh, when this was reported to him; but his wife turned pale and trembled as she recalled the undying hate expressed by Mahng's scowling face.
Gresley went up-stairs to change her gown, while Hester took charge of the children, as Fräulein had many days previously arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open windows of the doctor's red brick house opposite Abel's cottage.
It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight.
"Put out the lights," she said to Hester, at the kitchen door; "I am going up stairs." She entered her room. The insupportable sense of weariness, after the sleepless night that she had passed, weighed more heavily on her than ever. She locked her door, but forbore, on this occasion, to fasten the bolts.
"Look here, Hester Corey," said Tom Craig, "you promised, if you could be Queen, to be always sweet and pleasant. Do you call this keeping your promise?" "Pooh, who cares! I only promised, if the club stayed just the same. If you're going to put in a lot of new members without asking me, my promise doesn't count." "Ruth isn't 'a lot," said Marjorie, laughing at Hester's fury.
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