"Hester," he said, in a tone of such tenderness that it almost overpowered me, "I know I am trying your strength severely, I know I am. I may be inexcusable, I may be hazarding your health with my vehemence; tell me if it is so, I will not speak another word, I will rather give up all my own hopes. God forbid that you should suffer for my violence; speak to me, say a word, Hester, tell me what I am to do." "I can bear to hear all you have to say to me," I said, with a burning blush upon my cheek. The exertion I made to maintain my own calmness was exhausting me dreadfully, but I could bear it better when he spoke, and when my natural spirit of resistance was roused by his words, than when he went away or was silent, when I would be left to the consuming remorseful persecution of my own thoughts. When I said this he looked at me steadily and sadly;--"Was it hopeless then? would I receive him in no fashion but this?" I met his gaze with the blank look of sullen resentment; he turned away from me with a heavy sigh, and wrung his hands with impatience and suffering; then he came back, took the chair which Alice had been using, and sat down opposite to me. "Then it is to be so," he said with suppressed bitterness; "neither time nor solitude, neither tenderness nor absence, says a gentle word for me in your heart; you are resolved that we shall be miserable, Hester; you will leave me to the pity of the servants, _you_ will show none; you will condemn me to frightful anxiety, anxiety which I dare not venture to anticipate; you will shut me out from every right; I must not be near; I must not try to support you; is this what you quietly doom me to, Hester?" "You use strange words; I doom you to nothing," said I; "we were very wretched when we were together; you told me you were deceived in me, and I also was deceived in you; all that I have done is to come away, to free each of us from a galling and perpetual slavery. If I give no pity, I ask none; let justice be done between us, and it is justice surely to permit me to take care for myself when I do not encumber you. You have not more to suffer or to complain of than I have; we are on equal terms, and so long as we are apart we cannot drive each other mad, as you said I would do to you; I beseech you to be content, let us remain as we are; it will be best for us both." If I was agitated when I began to speak, I had become quite calm before I ended. He never withdrew his eye from me--he followed my motions, almost my breath--and when I moved my hands and clasped them together, as I did to support myself, his gaze turned to them--my hands were thin and worn, and very white--they looked like an invalid's. Before I was aware, he bent over and kissed them, saying, "Poor Hester! poor Hester!" Ah, it was very hard for me to keep up to my resolution, reading his thoughts as I did with an instinctive certainty. He was not thinking of my unkind and bitter words--he was thinking only of _me_.