"_Vive la Reine des Apaches! Vive la compagnie!_ To Margot! To Margot!" She swept them a merry bow, threw them a laughing salute, and drank the toast with them.
"Messieurs, my love--mesdames et mademoiselles, my admiration," she cried, with a ripple of joy-mad laughter.

"To the success of the Apaches, to the glory of four hundred thousand francs, and to the quick arrival of Serpice and Gaston!" Then, her upward glance catching sight of the musicians sipping their absinthe in the little gallery above, she flung her empty glass against the wall behind them, and shook with laughter as they started in alarm and spilled the green poison when they dodged aside.

"Another dance, you dawdlers!" she cried.

"Does Marise pay you to sit there like mourners?
Strike up, you mummies, or you pay yourselves for what you drink to-night.

Soul of desires!"-- as the musicians grabbed up their instruments, and a leaping, lilting, quick-beating air went rollicking out over the hubbub--"a quadrille, you angels of inspiration! Partners, gentlemen! Partners, ladies! A quadrille! A quadrille!" They set up a many-throated cheer and flocked out with her upon the floor; and in one instant feet were flying, skirts were whirling, laughter and jest mingling with waving arms and kicking toes, and the whole place was in one mad riot of delirious joy.
And in the midst of this there rolled up suddenly a voice crying, as from the bowels of the earth, "Hola! Hola! La la! loi!" the cry of the Apache to his kind.
"Mother of delights! It is one of us, and it comes from the sewer passage--from the sewer!" shrilled out Marise, as the dancers halted and Margot ran, with fleet steps, towards the bar.