“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother’s voice, and, flitting along as lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.

“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport.  But dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child.  “It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught me in the horn-book.”

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol.  She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.

“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”

“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother’s face.  “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”

“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning pale.

“What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”

“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously than she was wont to speak.  “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with,—­it may be he can tell.  But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?—­and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?—­and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character.  The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy.  It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect.  Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart.  And this, moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition.  Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker colouring.  But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s