wife taking counsel together.
Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and took out the knife.
Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol. Unprecedented perplexity!
For the last hour he had had two voices in his conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father''s testament, the other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony.
Up to that moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of possibility had presented itself.
However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had been reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces distant from the prisoner.
Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of despair.
All at once a shudder ran through him.
At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. On this paper he read the following line written that very morning, in large letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--
"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."
An idea, a flash, crossed Marius'' mind; this was the expedient of which he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.