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.