to the garden.

She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and
readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.

She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--

"None of that, Lisette!"

She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the
bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where
the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in
which Eponine was entirely concealed.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without
breathing, a prey to her thoughts.

Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who
passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making
haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted
the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall,
heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--

"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."

The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into
the black niche, and was greatly alarmed. He redoubled his pace.

This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later,
six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each
other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol,
entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the
others; a second later, all six were reunited.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

"This is the place," said one of them.

"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.

"I don't know. In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him
eat."

"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"

"Yes."

"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a
ventriloquist.

"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It won't screech
under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."

The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect
the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in
succession, and shaking them cautiously.

Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. As he was on the
point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,
fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push
in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not
loudly:--

"There's a dog."

At the same moment