It was only on the evening before that she had attempted to address him.
So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him displace the bar and slip into the garden.
She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.
She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--
"None of that, Lisette!"
She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the bar, as though she were guarding it.
It was precisely at the point where the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in which Eponine was entirely concealed.
She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to her thoughts.
Towards ten o''clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall, heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--
"I''m no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."
The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into the black niche, and was greatly alarmed.