(We have indicated once for all Toussaint's stammering, and we ask leave no longer to accentuate it, as we feel a musical notation of an infirmity to be repulsive.) Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and stroller by night, often did not return till a late hour. "Toussaint," Cosette continued, "be careful to put up the bars to the shutters looking on the garden, and to place the little iron things in the rings that close them." "Oh, I am sure I will, Miss." Toussaint did not fail, and Cosette was well aware of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding,-- "For it is so desolate here." "Well, that's true," said Toussaint; "we might be murdered before we had the time to say, Ouf! and then, too, master does not sleep in the house. But don't be frightened, Miss. I fasten up the windows like Bastilles. Lone women! I should think that is enough to make a body shudder. Only think! to see men coming into your bedroom and hear them say, 'Be quiet, you!' and then they begin to cut your throat. It is not so much the dying, for everybody dies, and we know that we must do so; but it is the abomination of feeling those fellows touch you; and then their knives are not sharp, perhaps; oh, Lord!" "Hold your tongue," said Cosette, "and fasten up everything securely." Cosette, terrified by the drama improvised by Toussaint, and perhaps too by the apparitions of the last week, which returned to her mind, did not even dare to say to her, "Just go and look at the stone laid on the bench;" for fear of having to open the garden gate again, and the men might walk in. She had all the doors and windows carefully closed, made Toussaint examine the whole house from cellar to attic, locked herself in her bedroom, looked under the bed, and slept badly. The whole night through, she saw the stone as large as a mountain and full of caverns. At sunrise--the peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laughter is always proportioned to the fear we have felt--at sunrise, Cosette, on waking, saw her terror like a nightmare, and said to herself: "What could I be thinking about! It was like the steps which I fancied I heard last week in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the chimney-pot. Am I going to turn coward now?" The sun, which poured through the crevices of her shutters and made the damask curtains one mass of purple, re-assured her so fully that all faded away in her mind, even to the stone. "There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round hat in the garden. I dreamed of the stone like the rest." She dressed herself, went down into the garden, and felt a cold perspiration all over her,--the stone was there. But this only lasted for a moment, for what is terror by night is curiosity by day. "Nonsense!" she said, "I'll see."