She emerged from the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer looking at or listening to anything. She only paused in her course when her breath failed her; but she did not halt in her advance.
She went straight before her in desperation.
As she ran she felt like crying.
The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.
She no longer thought, she no longer saw.
The immensity of night was facing this tiny creature.
On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an atom.
It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods to the spring.
Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times in daylight.
Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely.
But she did not turn her eyes either to right or to left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the brushwood.
In this manner she reached the spring.
It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall, crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills, and paved with several large stones.
A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little noise.
Cosette did not take time to breathe.
It was very dark, but she was in the habit of coming to this spring.
She felt with her left hand in the dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such violent excitement that her strength was trebled.
While thus bent over, she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into the spring.
The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water.
Cosette neither saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it on the grass.