Eight pages of faintly-tinted paper, much frayed, and with lines ruled by hand one way of the sheet only, were filled with the accounts of the herring season of 1705. At the bottom there was an attempt at picking out the items of profit and loss, and at reckoning the shares of owner, master, and man. The balance stood but too sadly on the wrong side. There was a deficit of forty pounds four shillings and sixpence.
The Bishop glanced at the entries, and passed them over with a sigh. But turning the leaves, he came upon other matter of more pathetic interest. This was a long personal narrative from the owner's pen, covering some two hundred of the pages. The Bishop looked it through, hurriedly, nervously, and with eager eyes. Then he gave up the book to Mona.
"Read it aloud, child," he said, in a voice unlike his own, and with a brave show of composure he settled himself to listen.
For two hours thereafter Mona read from the narrative that was written in the book. What that narrative was does not need to be told.
Often the voice of the reader failed her, sometimes it could not support itself. And in the lapses of her voice the silence was broken by her low sobs.
The Bishop listened long with a great outer calmness, for the affections of the father were struggling with a sense of the duty of the servant of God. At some points of the narrative these seemed so to conflict as to tear his old heart wofully. But he bore up very bravely, and tried to think that in what he had done seven years before he had done well. At an early stage of Mona's reading he stopped her to say:
"Men have been cast on desert islands beforetime, and too often they have been adrift on unknown seas."
Again he stopped her to add, with a slow shake of the head:
"Men have been outlawed, and dragged out weary years in exile—men have been oftentimes under the ban and chain of the law."
And once again he interrupted and said, in a trembling undertone, "It is true—it has been what I looked for—it has been a death in life."