Horace made southward, the cart rattling after, down the steep streets of Montmartre towards the merry roar of the city’s holiday-making. As the singing, shouting young fellows, hauling and pushing the swaying cart, rattled past the Moulin Rouge into the Place Blanche, they ran full tilt into the genial idle crowd that was out to make the mid-Lenten fête of the Micarême. From all the windows of the great boulevard thousands of gaily-coloured paper streamers were floating downwards. The broad damp roadway and the footpaths were strewn with many-tinted paper confetti that lay like a carpet, muffling the feet of the people as they moved chatting and laughing along the wide thoroughfare. What little wheeled traffic there was went at a foot’s pace.
The riot of students, with Gaston Latour blaring upon the horn, plunged into the procession.
The police made a rush towards the disturbance, but only to shrug shoulders when they reached the lumbered swaying cart:
“It is only the students!” said they, and fell a-laughing.
When they turned into the Place St. Michel they came plunging into the noisy crowd of holiday-makers again, and their march up the students’ beloved thoroughfare was a deafening and triumphant din.
“Orass” was evidently well known, and was greeted with the honours of a king of Bedlam.
It was in a pause that he took, coming to a halt between the shafts, to recover breath and give his other ear a turn of Gaston Latour’s hunting-horn, that Horace espied Noll and Betty standing in the throng. He called to them to come and join him.
So it came about that, with a laugh, and shyly enough, they joined the noisiest crew in all Paris that mad March morning.
Swinging round, when they got moving again, into a by-way, they soon came to a halt in an old courtyard not a hundred paces from Noll and Betty’s own home amongst the stars.
Horace touched Noll on the arm: