“Moll, quick! here they come!” She bent down and kissed the girl: “Let me think it out,” she said--“we must do something. I’ll do it. I know Eustace Lovegood well.... Now you are hostess--stand up--and take command of yourself.... That’s right.” She sprang to the door, unlocked it, and skipped back to the other. There was a loud knock. The Five Foolish Virgins trooped in, headed by Gaston Latour, playing on the French horn what was soon discovered to be “Yankee Doodle”--with a strong French accent. CHAPTER LIII _Wherein we skip down the Highway of Youth_ Saturday night. The Boule Miche was ablaze with light of frequent cafés; its roadway vexed with roar of wheeled traffic; its pavements astir with shuffle of many feet. From the Place Saint Michel, where the black waters of the stealthy river washed her quays in darkling passage to the far sea, the broad thoroughfare of the Boule Miche, the students’ highway, flaring in the black reek, swept upwards to the shadowy gardens of the Luxembourg, topped the hill, and was lost amongst the stars. Riverwards, where the Ile de la Cité, with sombre hint of law-courts and hospital, arose from out the flood in the pitchy murk of the night, loomed the dark cathedral towers of Notre Dame, gloomy with threat of eternal punishment to transgressors--and low down and afar gleamed the weeping lights of the Morgue, where sleep, after their last violence, the disowned and discarded dead. But neither above on the limitless blue, where are the stars, nor below on the unthinking litanies of an outworn creed, nor upon the rude death that ends alike the abstemious nun and the dizzy jig of Folly and Crime, were bent the thoughts of the multitudinous students who ranged the highway, making holiday--indeed, their eager eyes were wholly set upon living the conventional unconventionalities of youth, skipping down the highway of life with shout and laughter and song and merry riot, arm in arm, in rollicking mood, reckless of the flitting years, careless of the eternities. It was midnight, and the Bal Bullier being at an end, its frantic dancings done, and its doors closed, the youths were pouring into the Boule Miche with much rustle of prettily dressed young women who hung upon their arms--and were hovering about the lighted spaces where the cafés blazed into the street.