oor, to her own chamber, opened a
small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at
the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was
visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had
heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and
magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified
depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which
one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the
huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her
veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs
barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.
There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which
occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar
to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking
beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told
herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the
friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she
paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to
regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in
front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another
shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which
had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of
the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or
stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as
the gate, and fou