.
The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.
He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac''s lodgings.
Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--
"Would you believe it?
Marius comes home nowadays at one o''clock in the morning."
Bahorel replied:--
"What do you expect?
There''s always a petard in a seminary fellow."
At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to Marius:--
"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."
Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he called upon Marius to come back to reality.
One morning, he threw him this admonition:--
"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital, soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what''s her name?"
But nothing could induce Marius "to talk."
They might have torn out his nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable name, Cosette, was composed.
True love is as luminous as the dawn and as silent as the tomb.