he fact that Toussaint stuttered.
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often
returned quite late at night.

"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade
the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,
and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"

"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the
fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

"It is so solitary here."

"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might be
assassinated before we had time to say ouf! And Monsieur does not sleep
in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up
like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one shudder, I believe
you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at
night and say: 'Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. It's
not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's all right;
it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. And then, their
knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! Ah, good gracious!"

"Be quiet," said Cosette. "Fasten everything thoroughly."

Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and
possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week,
which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at
the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the
garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors
and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the
house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber,
bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.
All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full
of caverns.

At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all
our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion
to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she
woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have
I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a
week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the
chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" Th