"Is it my mother's voice?" whispered the young girl.
"Have you never heard it before, sobbing and wailing among the trees, or whispering softly when the leaves talk to the night?"
"Yes! oh, yes!"
"Have you never felt it in the night, or here at mid-day in the forest—felt it all around you, till the heart quaked in your bosom, and your limbs refused to move?"
"Ah, me! this also—this also!"
"And yet you ask, is it the voice of my mother?"
"Alas, how should I know? I who never, till this moment, dreamed that she who rests there had wrongs to complain of."
"Rests there—rests! why, girl, it is because she cannot rest that the wind brings her sobs to your ear—cannot rest while her youngest-born finds shelter with the most cruel of her enemies."
"The most cruel of her enemies!"
"He who sat in judgment upon a weak, helpless woman, when she came out from the wilderness with her baby sister strapped to her back, beseeching shelter among the people of her mother's race—the very people who had driven that mother forth to die among her enemies, because she was of a different faith, and believed in a God more merciful than the one they worshipped—this man was Samuel Parris."