swear it. And you
shall not think of him any more."

"Is it possible?"

She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragernent, while
dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far,
very far from the trap-doors.

"I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where HE can not
come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away ...
as you have sworn never to marry."

Christine seized Raoul's hands and squeezed them with incredible
rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her
head.

"Higher!" was all she said. "Higher still!"

And she dragged him up toward the summit.

He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very
roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses,
the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have
run from tree to tree in a forest.

And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every
moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own
shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she
did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.
As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in
front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.

Chapter XII Apollo's Lyre

On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as
lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the
three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over
Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called
Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the
zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes
in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather,
the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive.

The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the
two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down,
trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great
bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.

It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received
their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted
slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul:

"Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the
world, and then you will leave me, Raoul