les people to see them, and the night because it aids
in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the
garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one
there.

He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to himself
that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their departure; that
they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the street; that if this
man should discover him in the garden, he would cry out for help against
thieves and deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his
arms and carried her behind a heap of old furniture, which was out of
use, in the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir.

From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the
melon patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell
followed each of this man's movements. When the man approached, the
sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he
made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he
halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was attached
to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who had a
bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?

As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette's hands. They
were icy cold.

"Ah! good God!" he cried.

He spoke to her in a low voice:--

"Cosette!"

She did not open her eyes.

He shook her vigorously.

She did not wake.

"Is she dead?" he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering
from head to foot.

The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There
are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies, and
violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love are in
question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He remembered that
sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.

Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his
feet, without a movement.

He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a respiration
which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.

How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that
was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed wildly
from the ruin.

It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a
fire in less than a quarter of an hour.

CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL

He w