the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion remained lighted,
even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless and attentive, beheld a
throng of lively, dancing shadows pass athwart the many-colored
painted panes. Had he not been deaf, he would have heard more and more
distinctly, in proportion as the noise of sleeping Paris died away, a
sound of feasting, laughter, and music in the Gondelaurier mansion.

Towards one o'clock in the morning, the guests began to take their
leave. Quasimodo, shrouded in darkness watched them all pass out through
the porch illuminated with torches. None of them was the captain.

He was filled with sad thoughts; at times he looked upwards into the
air, like a person who is weary of waiting. Great black clouds, heavy,
torn, split, hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry dome of night.
One would have pronounced them spiders' webs of the vault of heaven.

In one of these moments he suddenly beheld the long window on the
balcony, whose stone balustrade projected above his head, open
mysteriously. The frail glass door gave passage to two persons, and
closed noiselessly behind them; it was a man and a woman.

It was not without difficulty that Quasimodo succeeded in recognizing
in the man the handsome captain, in the woman the young lady whom he
had seen welcome the officer in the morning from that very balcony. The
place was perfectly dark, and a double crimson curtain which had fallen
across the door the very moment it closed again, allowed no light to
reach the balcony from the apartment.

The young man and the young girl, so far as our deaf man could judge,
without hearing a single one of their words, appeared to abandon
themselves to a very tender tete-a-tete. The young girl seemed to have
allowed the officer to make a girdle for her of his arm, and gently
repulsed a kiss.

Quasimodo looked on from below at this scene which was all the more
pleasing to witness because it was not meant to be seen. He contemplated
with bitterness that beauty, that happiness. After all, nature was not
dumb in the poor fellow, and his human sensibility, all maliciously
contorted as it was, quivered no less than any other. He thought of the
miserable portion which Providence had allotted to him; that woman and
the pleasure of love, would pass forever before his eyes, and that he
should never do anything but behold the felicity of others. But that
which rent his heart most in this sight, that which mingled indignati