“This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment into which Pearl’s response had thrown him.  “Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her!  Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny!  Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no further.”

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.  Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.

“God gave me the child!” cried she.  “He gave her in requital of all things else which ye had taken from me.  She is my happiness—­she is my torture, none the less!  Pearl keeps me here in life!  Pearl punishes me, too!  See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for my sin?  Ye shall not take her!  I will die first!”

“My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minister, “the child shall be well cared for—­far better than thou canst do for it.”

“God gave her into my keeping!” repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice almost to a shriek.  “I will not give her up!” And here by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes.  “Speak thou for me!” cried she.  “Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can.  I will not lose the child!  Speak for me!  Thou knowest—­for thou hast sympathies which these men lack—­thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter!  Look thou to it!  I will not lose the child!  Look to it!”

At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne’s situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown into agitation.  He looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene of Hester’s public ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.

“There is truth in what she says,” began the minister, with a voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed and the hollow armour rang with it—­“truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her!  God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements—­both seemingly so peculiar—­which no other mortal being can possess.  And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child?”