He was in that subtlest of all moods when the mind swings out upon the human tide, comprehending its every ripple with a deep intuition that seems like a retrospective knowledge.  He had never until this moment stood alone in a Paris street at night; he had never before rubbed shoulders with a Parisian night crowd; but the inspiration was there—­the exaltation—­that made him one with this restless throng of men and women whose antecedents were unknown to him, whose future was veiled to his gaze.

The sensation culminated when, out of the crowd, a hand was laid upon his shoulder and a familiar voice rose above the babble of sound.

“Well, and are we girded for the heights?”

It came at the right moment, it lilted absolutely with his thoughts—­the soft, pleasant tones, the easy friendliness that seemed to accept all things as they came.  His instant answer was to smile into the Irishman’s face and to press the arm that had been slipped through his.

“It’s too early for anything very characteristic, but there are always impressions to be got.”

Again the boy replied by a pressure of the arm, and together he and Blake began to walk.  The strange pleasure of yielding himself to this man’s will filtered through Max’s being again, as it had done that morning, painting the world in rosy tints.  The situation was anomalous, but he ignored the anomaly.  His boats were burned; the great ice-bound sea protected him from the past; he was here in Paris, in the first moments of a fascinating present, under the guardianship of this comrade whose face he had never seen until yesterday, whose very name was still unfamiliar to his ears.  It was anomalous, but it held happiness; and who, equipped with youth and health, starting out upon life’s road, stops to question happiness?  He was the adventuring prince in the fairy-tale:  every step was taken upon enchanted ground.

Nothing gave him cause for quarrel as they made their way onward.  Even the Boulevard de Magenta, with its prosaic tram-lines, its large, cheap shops, its common brasseries and spanning railway bridge, seemed a place of promise; and as they passed on, ever mounting toward Montmartre, his brain quickened to new joy, new curiosity in every flaunting advertisement, every cobble-stone in the long steep way of the Boulevard Barbes, the rue de la Nature, and the rue de Clignancourt, until at length they emerged into the rue Andre de Sarte—­that narrow street, quaint indeed in its dark old houses and its small, mysterious wine shops that savor of Italy or Spain.

They paused, at the corner of the rue Andre de Sarte, by the doorway of an old, overcrowded curio shop—­the curio shop that in time to come was destined to become so familiar a landmark to them both, to stand sentinel at the gateway of so many emotions.