As he spoke, a great seething roar issued from the crowd. Ned, who had been sketching desultorily as he listened, raised his face. A huge bulge of grey went up into the sky--a mystery of bellying silk and intricate ropes straining at a little cockle-shell of a car. To the explosion of guns, to the frantic waving of flags and handkerchiefs, to the jubilant vociferating of half a city, the quasi-scientific toy rose, and was reflected as it sprang aloft in the pupils of ten thousand eyes. The circle of the mob dilated as its components yielded a pace or so to secure the better view, and the act brought the two disputants into Ned’s close neighbourhood. M. Reveillon, for all his late colloquy, was now no less hysterical than the rest of the company. “_Voilà_!” he shouted, clutching at the young fellow’s arm spasmodically: “is it not a sight the very acme of sublimity! Behold the unconquerable enterprise of man thus committed to victory or destruction. There is no middle course. He is to triumph or to die.” His excited grasp tightened on the sleeve he held. His glance travelled swiftly to and from the sketch-book, on a page of which Ned was endeavouring to hastily record some impression of the buoyant monster above. The Englishman marvelled to see this sudden eruption from so flat and commonplace a surface. “You can discipline yourself to draw in the face of this stupendous fascination,” cried the paper-maker. “_Mon Dieu_! that you had been with me at Boulogne in ’85, when Rozier’s Montgolfier took fire at the height of a thousand mètres, and he and Romain were precipitated to the earth!” He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he talked. “Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of Ned. “It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of rapturous retrospection. “We were looking--our _vivats_ still echoed in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled earthwards. It was fearful--heart-thrilling, that sound of a man falling through two-thirds of a mile. And the finish--the settling vibration! _Mon Dieu_! but I have never since missed an ascent.” “Fifteen sous a-day!” exclaimed David. But Ned instinctively withdrew himself from a touch that had grown unpleasant to him. “The cloven hoof!” he thought. “And is to be without bowels the secret of every plutocrat’s success?” “Fifteen sous a-day!” repeated David monotonously. Reveillon came back to earth a moment, and made him an ironic bow. “Certainly,” he said. “It is the wages of a good journeyman, and more than those of many an artist who disdains to be a time-server.” The disintegrated crowd, swarming abroad like a disturbed knot of newly hatched spiders, surrounded and absorbed him. _M. le peintre du Roi_ summoned Ned’s attention, peering over his shoulder.