r a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,
then disappeared.

Marius had halted for a moment.

He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little grayish
package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. It
was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.

"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."

He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and
went off to dine.

On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,
covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by a
candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.

"Poor mothers!" he thought. "There is one thing sadder than to see one's
children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."

Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his
thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.
He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness
in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of
Luxembourg.

"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself. "Young girls are
always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are
ghouls."

CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS

That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his hand
came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which he
had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that it
would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly contain
the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them, and, in
any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the person who
had lost it.

He opened the envelope.

It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.

They bore addresses.

All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.

The first was addressed: "To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"

Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.

It was conceived as follows:--

Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most
closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of