Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady quickly extinguished her own, and vanished.  Possibly, she went up among the clouds.  The minister saw nothing further of her motions.  The magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness—­into which, nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a mill-stone—­retired from the window.

The minister grew comparatively calm.  His eyes, however, were soon greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off was approaching up the street.  It threw a gleam of recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.  The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret.  As the light drew nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman—­or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly valued friend—­the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man.  And so he had.  The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour.  And now surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin—­as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates—­now, in short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted lantern!  The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled—­nay, almost laughed at them—­and then wondered if he was going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking—­

“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson.  Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”

Good Heavens!  Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken?  For one instant he believed that these words had passed his lips.  But they were uttered only within his imagination.  The venerable Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform.  When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness.