nd nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another
hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might
pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that
the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round
hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she
thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see
her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

"It cannot be anything," said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw
him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.
She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of fact, there
was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she
was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her
father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the
garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise
later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst
of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

"Cosette!"

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her
window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look,
there is your shadow with the round hat."

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and
which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man
wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of
sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were
allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,
she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron
chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did
not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was
really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she
had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same