s arms.

The soldiers were shooting down all who tried to escape. The situation
was terrible.

There was only one chance for life--underground. An iron grating, which
led to the sewers, was at his feet. Jean Valjean tore it open, and
disappeared with Marius on his shoulders.

He emerged, after a horrible passage through a grating by the bank of
the river, only to find there the implacable Javert!

Jean Valjean was quite calm.

"Inspector Javert," he said, "help me to carry this man home; then do
with me what you please."

A cab was waiting for the inspector. He ordered the man to drive to the
address Jean Valjean gave him. Marius, still unconscious, was taken to
his grandfather's house.

"Inspector Javert," said Jean Valjean, "grant me one thing more. Let me
go home for a minute; then you may take me where you will."

Javert told the driver to go to Rue de l'Homme-Arme, No. 7.

When they reached the house, Javert said, "Go up; I will wait here for
you!"

But before Jean Valjean reached his rooms Javert had gone, and the
street was empty.

Javert had not been at ease since his life had been spared. He was now
in horrible uncertainty. To owe his life to an ex-convict, to accept
this debt, and then to repay him by sending him back to the galleys was
impossible. To let a malefactor go free while he, Inspector Javert, took
his pay from the government, was equally impossible. It seemed there was
something higher and above his code of duty, something he had not come
into collision with before. The uncertainty of the right thing to be
done destroyed Javert, to whom life had hitherto been perfectly plain.
He could not live recognising Jean Valjean as his saviour, and he could
not bring himself to arrest Jean Valjean.

Inspector Javert made his last report at the police-station, and then,
unable to face the new conditions of life, walked slowly to the river
and plunged into the Seine, where the water rolls round and round in an
endless whirlpool.

Marius recovered, and married Cosette; and Jean Valjean lived alone. He
had told Marius who he was--Jean Valjean, an escaped convict; and Marius
and Cosette gradually saw less and less of the old man.

But before Jean Valjean died Marius learnt the whole truth of the heroic
life of the old man who had rescued him from the lost barricade. For the
first time he realised that Jean Valjean had come to the barricade only
to save him, knowing him to be in love with Cosette.