The lights, the shadows, the effects were all uncertain in this strange and fascinating neighborhood.  High above them, white against the winter sky, glimmered the domes of the Sacre-Coeur, looking down in symbolic silence upon the restless city; to the left stretched the rue Ronsard, with its deserted market and lonely pavement; to the right, the Escalier de Sainte-Marie, picturesque as its name, wound its precipitous way apparently to the very stars, while at their feet, creeping upward to the threshold of the church, was the plantation of rocks, trees, and holly bushes that in the mysterious darkness seemed aquiver with a thousand whispered secrets.  There was deep contrast here to the excitement, the vivacity of the boulevards; it seemed as if some shadow from the white domes above had given sanctuary to the spirit of the place—­the familiar spirit of the time-stained houses, the stone steps worn by many feet, the dark, naked trees.

The boy’s hand again pressed his companion’s arm.

“What are those steps?” He pointed to the right.

“The Escalier de Sainte-Marie; they lead up to the rue Mueller, and, if you desire it, to the Sacre-Coeur itself.  Shall we climb?”

“But yes!  Certainly!” The boy’s voice was tense and eager.  He hurried forward, drawing his companion with him, and side by side they began the mounting of the stone steps—­those steps, flanked by the row of houses, that rise one above the other, as if emulous to attain the skies.

Up they went, their ears attentive to the conflicting sounds that drifted forth from the doorways, their nostrils assailed by the faintly pungent scent of the shrubs in the plantation.  Higher and higher they climbed, sensible with each step of a greater isolation, of a rarer, clearer air.  Above them, in one of the higher houses in the rue Mueller, some one was playing a fiddle, and the piercing sweet sounds came through the night like a human voice, adding the poignancy, the passion and pathos of human things to the aloofness and unreality of the scene.

The boy was the first to catch this lonely music, and as though it called to him in some curious way, he suddenly freed his arm from Blake’s and ran forward up the steps.

When Blake overtook him he had passed up the rue Mueller, and was leaning over the wooden paling that fronts the Sacre-Coeur, his elbows resting upon it, his face between his hands, his eyes held by the glitter of Paris lying below him.

Blake came quietly up behind him.  “I thought you had given me the slip.”

He turned.  Again the light of inspiration, the curious illumination was apparent in his face.

“This is most wonderful!” he said.  “Most wonderful!  It is here that I shall live.  Here—­here—­with Paris at my feet.”

Blake laughed—­laughed good-humoredly at the finality, the artless arrogance of the tone.

“It may not be so easy to find a dwelling in the shadow of the Sacre-Coeur.”