The concierge’s tortoiseshell cat would come out and sit in a comfortable huddle of drowsiness upon the sun-warmed ground. Indeed, there had been strange, devilish, and Wagnerian music of late at night, and her modest eyes and demure person knew full well whose tortoiseshell lungs had been the source and set the key. Her nod could incriminate the black tom that sang the throaty ill-timed contralto to her shrill love-music--indeed, he sang under the whip. Even so might a concierge tell her love. And there were voices within open windows--and heads thrust out, pretty heads amongst them--and lively chatter would pass across the court, and jests were flung from story to story, and genial sarcasms would reach the concierge, who flung back time-honoured repartee and time-worn ironies. There was laughter and the singing of a snatch of song--a piano would run up the gamut of a scale. From afar the tuneful hum of the murmurous city sounded deeper, and there was increase in the passing clatter of the nearer traffic. The air was astir with the sayings of many mouths, the thrill of dancing thoughts. Through the open window the setting sun, streaming into her room, would find Betty at work, till Noll should come for her from the studio to take her out. He had tacked prints upon the walls above her desk, and there were books scattered about, and a pleasant picturesqueness held the place. From the early morning, when she arose blithely, put out her rosy-tipped white feet upon the floor, and got to the warming of the coffee at the cheerful stove and set the place astir with happy industry, making up the wonderful sommier, the bed of the students’ quarter, into a lounge for the day, and the like offices, until the twilight, when Noll came home, and they went out to dine at some cheap place with other students, Horace and the Five Foolish Virgins and the rest, Babette sitting next to her--all was one long delight of living. The mid-day meal at the restaurants had soon had to go; but she was well content enough, for she could make her own coffee, and he is a glutton indeed who is not content with the bread of Paris. As the sun’s amber light passed from the court and crept up the eastern wall, and the grey shadow of the dusk began to fall, full of chill other shadows, that took their stealthy stand in dark corners, and made a conspiracy of silence at the heels of the dying day, the air was filled with a mystic sense of evensong. For, when shutters were drawn to, by silent hands, and windows one by one were closed, and lamps gleamed yellow through the slats of close-shut jalousies, her lover’s feet would be leaping up the stairs, and in the deepening blue of the heavens a myriad white stars be set aflame. CHAPTER LI _Wherein it is hinted that it were Best to “Touch not the Catte botte a Glove”_