"Please take these letters and have them registered at the post-office," his mother said to Edgar in the hall, while the baron was outside ordering a cab. Edgar, remembering that until then his mother had sent the hotel boys on her errands, was suspicious. Were they hatching something against him? He hesitated. "Where will you wait for me?" "Here." "For sure?" "Yes." "Now be sure to. Don't leave before I come back. You'll wait right here in the hall, won't you?" In the consciousness of his superiority he had adopted a commanding tone with his mother. Many things had changed since the day before yesterday. At the door he encountered the baron, to whom he spoke for the first time in two days. "I am going to the post-office to register these letters. My mother is waiting for me. Please do not go until I come back." The baron hastened past him. "All right. We'll wait." Edgar ran at top speed to the post-office, where he had to wait while a man ahead of him asked a dozen silly questions. Finally his turn came, and at last he was free to run back to the hotel, which he reached just in time to see the couple driving off. He turned rigid with anger, and had the impulse to pick up a stone and throw it at them. So they had escaped him after all, but by what a mean, contemptible lie! He had discovered the day before that his mother lied, but that she could so wantonly disregard a definite, expressed promise, shattered his last remnant of confidence. He could not understand life at all any more, now that he realized that the words which he had thought clothed a reality were nothing more than bursting bubbles. But what a dreadful secret it must be that drove grown-up people to such lengths, to lie to him, a child, and to steal away like criminals! In the books he had read, men deceived and murdered one another for money, power, empire, but what was the motive here? What were his mother and the baron after? Why did they hide from him? What were they, with their lies, trying to conceal? He racked his brain for answers to the riddle. Vaguely he divined that this secret was the bolt which, when unlocked, opened the door to let out childhood, and to master it meant to be grown up, to be a man at last. Oh, to know what it was! But he could no longer think clearly. His rage at their having escaped him was like a fire that sent scorching smoke into his eyes and kept him from seeing. He ran to the woods and in the nick of time reached a quiet dark spot, where no one could see him, and burst into tears. "Liars! Dogs! Mean--mean--mean!"