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." But as Mona went on to read of how the outcast man, kept back from speech with every living soul, struggled to preserve the spiritual part of him, the Bishop interrupted once more, and said, in a faltering voice: "This existence has been quite alone in its desolation." As Mona went on again to read of how the unblessed creature said his prayer in his solitude, not hoping that God would hear, but thinking himself a man outside God's grace, though God's hand was upon him--thinking himself a man doomed to everlasting death, though the blessing of Heaven had already fallen over him like morning dew--then all that remained of spiritual pride in the heart of the Bishop was borne down by the love of the father, and his old head fell into his breast, and the hot tears rained down his wrinkled cheeks. Later the same night Mona sent for Davy Fayle. The lad was easily found; he had been waiting in the darkness outside the house, struggling hard with a desire to go in and tell Mistress Mona where Daniel Mylrea was to be found. "Davy," she said, "do you know where he is?" "Sure," said Davy. "And you could lead me to him?" "I could." "Then come here very early in the morning, and we will go together." Next day when Mona, attired for her journey, went down for a hasty breakfast, she found the Bishop fumbling a letter in his trembling fingers. "Read this, child," he said in a thick voice, and he handed the letter to her. She turned it over nervously. The superscription ran, "These to the Lord Bishop of Man, at his Palace of Bishop's Court," and the seal on the other face was that of the insular Government. While the Bishop made pretense of wiping with his handkerchief the horn-bridged spectacles on his nose Mona opened and read the letter.