He halted before her, put his heels together, took off his hat, and bowed solemnly. Madame, he said, he felt sure, would understand and allow for his emotion on quitting her house. He handed the key into her grasping outstretched fingers, that were itching for a fee, and commended her soul to her Maker. “He insults me!” she cried; and the students fell a-laughing. Horace turned on his heel as the violent oaths poured from the old shrew’s scolding lips; and the loud tan-tan-taras of the students and the brassy blaring of the French horn drowned the torrent of abuse. They began to sing the _Marseillaise_. Horace walked calmly over to the handcart, took off his coat and hat, gave them to the girl, and getting between the shafts, he slipped the leather brace over his shoulders, and, with the help of his singing companions, pulled the overloaded and swaying cart towards the gateway--and lurched out into the bright March morning. Horace made southward, the cart rattling after, down the steep streets of Montmartre towards the merry roar of the city’s holiday-making. As the singing, shouting young fellows, hauling and pushing the swaying cart, rattled past the _Moulin Rouge_ into the Place Blanche, they ran full tilt into the genial idle crowd that was out to make the mid-Lenten fête of the Micarême. From all the windows of the great boulevard thousands of gaily-coloured paper streamers were floating downwards. The broad damp roadway and the footpaths were strewn with many-tinted paper confetti that lay like a carpet, muffling the feet of the people as they moved chatting and laughing along the wide thoroughfare. What little wheeled traffic there was went at a foot’s pace. The riot of students, with Gaston Latour blaring upon the horn, plunged into the procession. The police made a rush towards the disturbance, but only to shrug shoulders when they reached the lumbered swaying cart: “It is only the students!” said they, and fell a-laughing. When they turned into the Place St. Michel they came plunging into the noisy crowd of holiday-makers again, and their march up the students’ beloved thoroughfare was a deafening and triumphant din. “Orass” was evidently well known, and was greeted with the honours of a king of Bedlam. It was in a pause that he took, coming to a halt between the shafts, to recover breath and give his other ear a turn of Gaston Latour’s hunting-horn, that Horace espied Noll and Betty standing in the throng. He called to them to come and join him. So it came about that, with a laugh, and shyly enough, they joined the noisiest crew in all Paris that mad March morning. Swinging round, when they got moving again, into a by-way, they soon came to a halt in an old courtyard not a hundred paces from Noll and Betty’s own home amongst the stars. Horace touched Noll on the arm: “Take her up to the top rooms,” said he, nodding towards Betty--“they are mine. I’ll be there in a minute.”