Madame d'Estrelle's heart beat very fast. She looked at the bench which the child indicated, and recognized no one there. Marcel scrutinized it closely. Juliot had made a mistake. The person he had taken for Julien turned his face toward them. It was not he; he was not there. As a matter of fact, he was in one of the upper galleries, just over the box in which Julie was hiding, and he was a hundred leagues from suspecting that by going down to the ground floor, he might at least have made an attempt to see her. Indeed, if he had known it, he would have kept his place. He was fully determined not to seek any more furtive opportunities to meet her. As an artist he was entitled to admission at the Français. He listened to _Polyeucte_ meditatively, as a pious person listens to the sermon, and he went out before the end, fearing that his mother would sit up for him. As he passed through the vestibule, he was very much astonished to find himself face to face with Uncle Antoine. It was Uncle Antoine's invariable rule to go to bed at eight o'clock, and it was probable that he had never set foot in a theatre. Julien accosted him frankly; that was the better way, even though he were to be ill received. "So you are found at last?" he said. "We were anxious about you." "Who are _we?_" rejoined the uncle in a surly tone. "Marcel and I." "You are very good! Did you think I had gone to the Indies, pray, that you are so surprised to see me?" "I confess that I hardly expected to see you here." "And I, on the contrary, was sure of meeting you here!" And without explaining that reply, which to Julien was absolutely enigmatical, he turned his back on him. "Well, well! his mind is really unhinged," thought Julien. And he passed on, but not without turning two or three times to see if the amateur in gardens went in or out, and if it were not the case that he had come there unconsciously; but every time that he looked he saw Monsieur Antoine standing motionless at the foot of the staircase, and looking after him with a mocking expression, in which however there was no sign of mental derangement. Uncle Antoine disappeared in the crowd, which invaded the peristyle a few moments later. One of the first groups that he saw consisted of the solicitor's family, with a stranger taller than Madame Marcel, and completely concealed by her black silk headgear. He stole down to the street and took the number of the cab which that group entered, then despatched in pursuit of that cab the same shrewd and nimble-footed spy who had notified him that Madame d'Estrelle had gone out with her attorney, and who had been keeping watch outside the D'Estrelle mansion, and inside it at times, for a month past, under disguises of all sorts and on all sorts of pretexts.