ed save for
the presence of the assiduous young waiter, who came hurrying forward as
though no span of hours and incidents separated yesterday's meal from
to-day's.

His attentive attitude was unrelaxed, his smile was as deferential as
before, but this morning he found a less responsive guest. Max was
filled with a quiet assurance that debarred familiarity; Max, in fine,
was bound upon a quest, and the submissive young waiter, the bare
eating-room, Paris itself, formed but the setting and background in his
arrogant young mind to the greatness of the mission.

The thought--the small seed of thought that was responsible for the idea
had been sown last night, as he leaned over the parapet fronting the
Sacre-Coeur, looking down upon the city with its tangle of lights; and
later, in the hours of darkness, when he had tossed on his heavy bed,
too excited to lure sleep, it had fructified with strange rapidity,
growing and blossoming with morning into definite resolve.

He drank his coffee and ate his roll in happy preoccupation, and, having
finished his meal, left the room and went quietly down the stairs and
through the glass door of the hotel.

The frost still held; Paris still smiled; and, buttoning up his coat, he
paused for a moment on the doorstep to turn his face to the copper-red
sun and breathe in the crisp, invigorating air; then, with a quaintly
decisive manner that seemed to set sentiment aside, he walked to the
edge of the footpath and hailed a passing _fiacre_.

"To the church of the Sacre-Coeur," he commanded.

The _cocher_ received the order with a grumble, looked from his
unreliable horse to the frosty roadway, and was about to shake his head
in definite negation when Max cajoled him with a more ingratiating
voice.

"The rue Ronsard, then? Will you take me to the corner of the rue
Ronsard?"

The man grumbled again, and shrugged his shoulders until his ears
disappeared in the shaggy depths of his fur cape; but, when all hope
seemed fled, he laconically murmured the one word "_Bon!_" whipped up
his horse, and started off with a fine disregard of whether his fare had
taken his seat or been left behind upon the footpath.

To those who know Montmartre only as an abode of night--a place of light
and laughter and folly--Montmartre in the day, Montmartre at half-past
nine in the morning, comes as a revelation. The whole picture is as a
coin reversed. The theatres, the music-halls, the _cabarets_ all lie
wi