They must have been walking very slowly indeed. It took them an eternity. Circumspectly he peeped out of the shadowed frame. There, at length, they came at a snail's pace, the moonlight shining on their clothes. They looked like ghosts in the greenish shimmer, and the delicious horror came upon him again whether it really might have been a murder, and what a dreadful catastrophe he had averted by his presence. He could clearly see their faces, which looked chalky in the white light. His mother had an expression of rapture that in her was strange to him, while the baron looked hard and dejected. Probably because he had failed in carrying out his purpose. They were very close to the hotel now, but it was not until they reached the steps that their figures separated from each other. Would they look up? Edgar waited eagerly. No. "They have forgotten all about me," he thought wrathfully, and then, in triumph, "but I haven't forgotten you. You think I am asleep or non-existent, but you'll find out you're mistaken. I'll watch every step you take until I have got the secret out of you, you villain, the dreadful secret that keeps me awake nights. I'll tear the strings that tie you two together. I am not going to go to sleep." As the couple entered the doorway, their shadows mingled again in one broad band that soon dwindled and disappeared. And once more the space in front of the hotel lay serene in the moonlight, like a meadow of snow. CHAPTER XI THE SURPRISE ATTACK Edgar moved away from the window, breathing heavily, in a shiver of horror. A gruesome mystery of this sort had never touched his life before, the bookish world of thrilling adventure, excitement, deception and murder having always belonged to the same realm as the wonderland of fairy tales, the realm of dreams, far away, in the unreal and unattainable. Now he was plunged right into the midst of this fascinatingly awful world, and his whole being quivered deliriously. Who was this mysterious being who had stepped into his quiet life? Was he really a murderer? If not, why did he always try to drag his mother to a remote, dark spot? Something dreadful, Edgar felt certain, was about to happen. He did not know what to do. In the morning he would surely write or telegraph his father--or why not that very moment? His mother was not in her room yet, but was still with that horrid person. The outside of the door to Edgar's room was hung with a portière, and he opened his door softly now, closed it behind him, and stuck himself between the door and the portière, listening for his mother's steps in the corridor, determined not to let her stay by herself a single instant.