that did not concern the impression he was making on
the world. At present he could only think of Zoe and of her future.

When a patronizing and aggressive commercial traveller in the little
hotel on a side-street where he had taken a room in Montreal said to
him, "Bien, mon vieux" (which is to say, "Well, old cock"), "aren't
you a long way from home?" something of a new dignity came into Jean
Jacques' bearing, very different from the assurance of the old days, and
in reply he said:

"Not so far that I need be careless about my company." This made the
landlady of the little hotel laugh quite hard, for she did not like the
braggart "drummer" who had treated her with great condescension for a
number of years. Also Madame Glozel liked Jean Jacques because of his
canary. She thought there must be some sentimental reason for a man of
fifty or more carrying a bird about with him; and she did not rest
until she had drawn from Jean Jacques that he was taking the bird to his
daughter in the West. There, however, madame was stayed in her search
for information. Jean Jacques closed up, and did but smile when she
adroitly set traps for him, and at last asked him outright where his
daughter was.

Why he waited in Montreal it would be hard to say, save that it was a
kind of middle place between the old life and the new, and also because
he must decide what was to be his plan of search. First the West--first
Winnipeg, but where after that? He had at last secured information of
where Zoe and Gerard Fynes had stayed while in Montreal; and now he
followed clues which would bring him in touch with folk who knew them.
He came to know one or two people who were with Zoe and Gerard in the
last days they spent in the metropolis, and he turned over and over in
his mind every word said about his girl, as a child turns a sweetmeat in
its mouth. This made him eager to be off; but on the very day he decided
to start at once for the West, something strange happened.

It was towards the late afternoon of a Saturday, when the streets were
full of people going to and from the shops in a marketing quarter, that
Madame Glozel came to him and said:

"M'sieu', I have an idea, and you will not think it strange, for you
have a kind heart. There is a woman--look you, it is a sad, sad story
hers. She is ill and dying in a room a little way down the street. But
yes, I am sure she is dying--of heart disease it is. She came here first
when the illness took