"Now," continued Barbara, "I will task your kindness once more, and have done. My friend, while there is yet time, bring your daughter hither, with my son--the young man they call Norman Lovel. Before I go they must be wedded, else some new trouble may arise to separate them." "Even as thou wishest it shall be done," answered the old man, taking his hat and staff. "I who have wrought so much evil would fain make atonement--so far as a weak mortal can." Parris went to the door, but came back again, struck with a sudden objection. "But Sir William Phipps--the young man being his son--might hereafter blame me as ambitious for my child," he said. "Have no fear," answered the lady. "When I am dead, he will thank you for giving me this one gleam of happiness. Norman, when he knows that it was his mother who blessed him--and he must learn this hereafter--will look on his young wife with double tenderness." "And must it now be kept secret from him?" "Even so, or to-morrow would break his heart." The old man went out. He had not far to go, for Elizabeth had accompanied him to the jail, afraid to be separated from him for a moment, and hoping, poor child, to obtain forgiveness for the honest evidence she had borne against the unhappy prisoner before the death hour. She that moment sat shivering in the jailor's room, waiting to be summoned into Barbara's dungeon. Norman Lovel was by her side, but she refused to be comforted even by the voice of her lover, who would not leave her till the minister came. Thus, hand in hand, they were found together when the old man entered the room, where they sat; and solemnly, as if he had been summoning them to a funeral, bade them follow him. CHAPTER LIII. THE PRISON WEDDING. That was a gloomy, almost terrible wedding. There those young people stood waiting for the ceremony, pale as death, their trembling hands linked together, shivering with nervous chills, as if it were a doom of judgment about to be pronounced upon them, rather than those sacred words which should make love immortal. When she entered the dungeon, Elizabeth had cast herself at Barbara's feet, and meekly begged the pardon that young heart would never grant itself. All the doubt and bitterness which had blinded her so long were swept away. The true-hearted young creature would have found courage to die in the place of her victim, and think that too little atonement for the evil she had done. But, alas! alas! the power of restitution is not always vouchsafed to our crimes or our mistakes in this world. The inexorable law had seized upon its victim, and Elizabeth Parris might moan her life away in unavailing regret without aiding her, or arresting, for one moment, the doom that was darkly closing around her.