"Midnight!"
She had been counting the strokes of the clock, the sound of which came, muffled and sullen, from the old square belfry beyond the Panthéon.
The roofs of this old quarter presented a curious conglomeration of the architectural monstrosities of seven centuries. It was a fantastic tumult of irregular shapes that only took the semblance of human design upon being considered in detail. As a whole they seemed the result of a great upheaval of nature—the work of some powerful demon—rather than that of human architectural conception. These confused and frightful shapes stretched from street to street,—stiff steeps of tile and moss-covered slate, massive chimneys and blackened chimney-pots, great dormer-windows and rows of mere slits and holes of glass betraying the existence of humanity within, walls and copings of rusty stone running this way and that and stopping abruptly, mysterious squares of even blackness representing courts and breathing-spaces,—up hill and down dale, under the canopy of stars, as far as the eye could reach!
And here, close at hand, and towering aloft in the entrancing grandeur of celestial beauty, rose the dome of the Panthéon,—so close, indeed, and so grandly great and beautiful in contrast with all the rest, that it seemed the stupendous creation of the angels.
"You are cold, petite?" he whispered.
She had shivered and drawn a little closer to him.
"No," replied the girl, glancing around her, "but it is frightful."
"What?"
"Oh, these sombre roofs."
"Bah! petite," he responded lightly, "ghosts don't promenade the roofs of Paris."