Beau Cheval, or in his glorious province, not because he had found his
Zoe, but because a man, the man--not George Masson, but the other--met
him in the way.

Shilah was a place to which, almost unconsciously, he had deviated his
course, because once Virginie Poucette had read him a letter from there.
That was in the office of the little Clerk of the Court at Vilray. The
letter was from Virginie's sister at Shilah, and told him that Zoe and
her husband had gone away into farther fields of homelessness. Thus it
was that Shilah ever seemed to him, as he worked West, a goal in his
quest--not the last goal perhaps, but a goal.

He had been far past it by another route, up, up and out into the more
scattered settlements, and now at last he had come to it again, having
completed a kind of circle. As he entered it, the past crowded on to him
with a hundred pictures. Shilah--it was where Virginie Poucette's sister
lived; and Virginie had been a part of the great revelation of his life
at St. Saviour's.

As he was walking by the riverside at Shilah, a woman spoke to him,
touching his arm as she did so. He was in a deep dream as she spoke,
but there certainly was a look in her face that reminded him of someone
belonging to the old life. For an instant he could not remember. For a
moment he did not even realize that he was at Shilah. His meditation had
almost been a trance, and it took him time to adjust himself to the
knowledge of the conscious mind. His subconsciousness was very
powerfully alive in these days. There was not the same ceaselessly
active eye, nor the vibration of the impatient body which belonged to the
money-master and miller of the Manor Cartier. Yet the eye had more depth
and force, and the body was more powerful and vigorous than it had ever