its distinct
and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery
of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.

And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the
blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly
chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,
wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like
a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the
passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of
death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which
he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in
order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?
This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance to
that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived an
idea of anything similar.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once
more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was
still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,
harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barred
and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more biting
breeze blew in the cage of these doves.

Why?

When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in
amazement before this mystery of sublimity.

In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart
in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him
back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the
convent through humility.

Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was
deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which
skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed on
the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,
the sister was making reparation, prostrated