Madame Thierry had made up her mind not to say another word about Julien, but it was impossible for her to keep to her determination. Step by step she finally reached the point where she gave full expression to her idolatry of that adored son, who well deserved to be adored. The countess listened without any uncalled-for scruples to her enumeration of the young artist's talents and virtues. But she became a little melancholy at the thought that she should probably never have children to afford occupation for her youth and console her old age. Madame Thierry divined her secret thought and changed the subject. [Illustration 02: _JULIEN'S RUSE_ _He went to the window, the lower sash of which was really nailed in its place and covered with a green cloth; but there was an imperceptible slit in that cloth, there was a scratch on the ground glass, and through that treacherous crevice, cunningly made and cunningly concealed, he saw Madame d'Estrelle every day._] What was Julien doing while they were talking about him in the little summer salon of the hôtel d'Estrelle? He was working, or was supposed to be working. He constantly changed his position, he was hot and cold, he started at the slightest sound. He said to himself that perhaps his name was on the countess's lips at that moment, that perhaps she was asking some question about him, merely as a matter of form, without listening to the answer. He went to the window, the lower sash of which was really nailed in its place and covered with a green cloth; but there was an imperceptible slit in that cloth, there was a scratch on the ground glass, and through that treacherous crevice, cunningly made and cunningly concealed, he saw Madame d'Estrelle every day, strolling among the shrubbery in her garden, and walking along the path which was in full view from the pavilion. Julien knew almost to a minute her regular hours for that walk. When some accident interfered with her usual practice, then mysterious presentiments, the divinatory instinct which belongs only to love, and especially to a first love, warned him of Julie's approach. Then he invented a thousand pretexts, each more ingenious than the last, for turning his mother's vigilant eye in some other direction and gazing at his fair neighbor; or else he would find that he had to go and get something in his bedroom, and would go upstairs, his mother remaining below, enter her room and look through the blind. In fact he had adored Julie for a fortnight, and Julie thought that he had never seen her, and Madame Thierry lied unconsciously when she said that her son could see nothing from the studio, and that he had never looked out of her bedroom windows.