"What are those steps?" He pointed to the right.

"The Escalier de Sainte-Marie; they lead up to the rue Müller, and, if
you desire it, to the Sacré-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 Müller,
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 Müller, and was leaning
over the wooden paling that fronts the Sacré-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."