amp.

"Leads to the roof, probably," she muttered.

"Probably. Let us mount."

"Oh, yes, let us follow the trail."

The instinct of the woman and the spy was now strong within her.

The "cat stairs" were closed at the top by a heavy oaken trap securely
fastened within by two iron hooks.

"It is astonishing!" he said.

"What?"

"These fastenings, keys, bolts, bars, are all on this side."

"Which shows merely that they are to be used only from this direction,
does it not?"

"Yes, that is plain; but we are now in another building, evidently,--a
building that must open on some other street than the Rue St.
Jacques."

In the mean time Jean had finally unfastened and forced the trap. In
another moment he had drawn her through the opening and they stood
under a cloudless sky.

"Ah!" she murmured.

"We are free, at least, mon enfant."

She was not thinking of that. The silence, the glorious vault of
stars, the----

"S-sh!"

"It's the bell of Sainte Genevieve," he whispered, crossing himself
involuntarily.

"Cover the light, Monsieur Jean. These roofs have scores of eyes----"

"And a couple of prowlers might be the target for a score of bullets,
eh? True enough!"

"Midnight!"

She had been counting the strokes of the clock, the sound of which
came, muffled and sullen, from the old square belfry beyond the
Pantheon.

The roofs of this old quarter presented a curious conglomeration of
the architectural monstrosities of seven centuries. It was a fantastic
tumult of irregular shapes that only took the semblance of human
design upon being considered in detail. As a whole they seemed the
result of a great upheaval of nature--the work of some powerful
demon--rather than that of human architectural conception. These
confused and frightful shapes stretched from street to street,--stiff
steeps of tile and moss-covered slate, massive chimneys and blackened
chimney-pots, great dormer-windows and rows of mere slits and holes of
glass betraying the existence of humanity within, walls and copings of
rusty stone running this way and that and stopping abruptly,
mysterious squares of even blackness representing courts and
breathing-spaces,--up hill and down dale, under the canopy of stars,
as far as the eye could reach!

And here, close at hand, and towering aloft in the entrancing
grandeur of celestial beauty, rose the dome of the Pantheon,--so
close, indeed, and so grandly great and beautiful in contrast with al