Max watched them for a moment with a deep intentness, then wheeled round swiftly and caught Blake's arm.
"Ned! Take me somewhere! I would forget myself!"
"What troubles you, boy? Not the thought of the picture?"
"No! A something of no consequence. Do not question me. Be kind to me, and take me where I can see life and forget myself."
"Where will I take you?"
"To some place of gayety—where no one thinks."
"Very well! We'll go over and have supper at the Rat Mort. You won't be over-troubled with thought there. We can sit in a corner and observe, and I give you my word there will be no encounters with old friends this time! I'll be blind and deaf and dumb if anything is washed up from the past!"
Guiding the boy across the crowded roadway, he passed through the narrow door and up the steep stair that ends so abruptly into the long, low supper-room of the Rat Mort.
Max felt the abruptness of this entry, as so many climbers of the ladder-like stairs have felt it before him; and a dazed sensation seized upon him as the wild Ztigane music of the stringed orchestra beat suddenly upon his ears and the intense white light struck upon his sight.
He felt it as others have felt it—the excitement, the consciousness of an emotional atmosphere—as he followed Blake down the dazzingly bright room. It was in the air, as it had been at the Bal Tabarin.