It was Sunday morning, and the sleeping streets echoed to the rattle of the flying wheels. When they got into the country (they were taking the shortest cuts) the farms were lying idle and quiet. Stowell sat with folded arms while they raced past the whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs, and scattered flocks of geese that went off with screams and stretched necks. On arriving at Ballamoar he paused before entering the house. The pastoral tranquillity of the place was heart-breaking. The sun had risen, the rooks were cawing, the linnets were twittering in the eaves, a kitten was playing with a butterfly in the porch--it was just as if nothing had happened during the night. Janet was in his father's room, with red eyes and a handkerchief in her hand. She did not speak, but her silence seemed to say, "Why didn't you come before?" Stowell advanced to the side of the bed. The august face on the pillow, in the majesty and tranquillity of death, had never before looked so calm and noble, but that also seemed to say: "Why didn't you come before?" He reached over and put his lips to the cold forehead. And then, with head down, he hurried from the room. He could never afterwards remember what he did during the rest of that day--only that to escape from the vague cheerfulness, the hushed bustle, the half-smothered hysteria, which come to a house after a death, he had strolled along the shore and past the ruined church in which he had walked with Fenella. At length Janet came to him in the library to say "Good-night" and to sob out something about not grieving too much. And then he was left alone. Sitting at the desk, where his father had sat the night before, he took up the leather-bound book and read it from end to end--not without a sense of looking into the sanctuary of another soul, where only God's eyes should see. It was a large volume, of some five hundred quarto pages, with "Isobel's Diary" inscribed on its first page, and these words below: "Inasmuch as I cannot believe that my beloved companion who has died to-day is lost to me even in this life, and being convinced that the divine purpose in leaving me behind is that I may care for and guard her child, I dedicate this book to the record of my sacred duty." Then followed, in the Deemster's steady handwriting, a daily entry, sometimes only a phrase or a line, sometimes a page, but always about his son: "This morning in the library, making my desk under your portrait his altar, Parson Cowley baptised your boy--Janet Curphey standing godmother, and the Attorney his other sponsor. We called him Victor, so the last of your dear wishes has been fulfilled." Stowell looked up and around him. He was on the very spot of that scene of so many years ago. Then came records of his childhood, his childish talk, his childish rhymes, his childish ailments: