Page 1220 - les-miserables

threshold, and stared intently at Marius.
On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg.
Marius waited for them all day in vain.
At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l’Ouest, and saw a
light in the windows of the third story.
He walked about beneath the windows until the light
was extinguished.
The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited
all day, then went and did sentinel duty under their win-
dows. This carried him on to ten o’clock in the evening.
His dinner took care of itself. Fever nourishes the sick
man, and love the lover.
He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer
appeared at the Luxembourg.
Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared
not watch the porte cochere during the day; he contented
himself with going at night to gaze upon the red light of the
windows. At times he saw shadows flit across them, and his
heart began to beat.
On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows,
there was no light in them.
‘Hello!’ he said, ‘the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark.
Can they have gone out?’ He waited until ten o’clock. Until
midnight. Until one in the morning. Not a light appeared
in the windows of the third story, and no one entered the
house.
He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.
On the morrow,—for he only existed from morrow to
morrow, there was, so to speak, no to-day for him,—on the

1220 Les Miserables