"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as
waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or
unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from
any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous
temperament.--"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled
physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited
by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"
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Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear,
wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the
adjacent burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open
window--for it was summer-time--the minister beheld Hester
Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that
traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day,
but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which,
whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the
sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the
broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy--perhaps of
Isaac Johnson himself--she began to dance upon it. In reply to
her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more
decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from
a tall burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of
these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter
that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their
nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did not pluck them off.
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