In choosing to hide his marriage to Hester and pursue her lover, Chillingworth loses his soul and thus himself to the Devil. The reader first meets Chillingworth during Hester's humiliation on the scaffold where Hawthorne describes the man as having "a remarkable intelligence in his features" (56). Later in the woods Hester remembers him as an "intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet" (148) and so the pattern continues, in his past life Chillingworth was a scholar "accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value or import" (56). But why then does Hester finish her thought in the woods by realizing that the man she had known "had already vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce" (148)
