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