wiped her eyes and deplored his going, and said that if ever he wanted a
home, and she was alive, he would know where to find it. It sounded and
looked sentimental, yet Jean Jacques was never less sentimental in a very
sentimental life. This particular morning he was very quiet and grave,
and not in the least agitated; he spoke like one from a friendly, sun-
bright distance to Mme. Glozel, and also to Mme. Popincourt as he passed
her at the door of her house.

Jean Jacques had no elation as he took the Western trail; there was not
much hope in his voice; but there was purpose and there was a little
stream of peace flowing through his being--and also, mark, a stream of
anger tumbling over rough places. He had read two letters addressed to
Carmen by the man--Hugo Stolphe--who had left her to her fate; and there
was a grim devouring thing in him which would break loose, if ever the
man crossed his path. He would not go hunting him, but if he passed him
or met him on the way--! Still he would go hunting--to find his
Carmencita, his little Carmen, his Zoe whom he had unwittingly, God knew!
driven forth into the far world of the millions of acres--a wide, wide
hunting-ground in good sooth.

So he left his beloved province where he no longer had a home, and though
no letters came to him from St. Saviour's, from Vilray or the Manor
Cartier, yet he heard the bells of memory when the Hand Invisible
arrested his footsteps. One day these bells rang so loud that he would
have heard them were he sunk in the world's deepest well of shame; but,
as it was, he now marched on hills far higher than the passes through the
mountains which his patchwork philosophy had ever provided.

It was in the town of Shilah on the Watloon River that the bells boomed
out--not because he had encountered one he had ever known far down by the