'It Was a Mask'

It might be on this one day that there was an expression unseen before, nor indeed vivid enough to be detected now. It would have been impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of gloomy grey. Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature? Should we suppose a feeling of regret in hester's mind at the time when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being? Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last long, breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloves with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured