“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,—­“a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame.  Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil?  How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?”

“No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr. Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth.  “Not to thee!  But, if it be the soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul!  He, if it stand with His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill.  Let Him do with me as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good.  But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?”

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile.  “There is nothing lost.  We shall be friends again anon.  But see, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself!  As with one passion so with another.  He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart.”

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore.  The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician’s words to excuse or palliate.  He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly sought.  With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour.  Roger Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient’s apartment, at the close of the professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon his lips.  This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale’s presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.

“A rare case,” he muttered.  “I must needs look deeper into it.  A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body!  Were it only for the art’s sake, I must search this matter to the bottom.”