"The date--upper right-hand corner. Have you written it? Space. Dear Sir, colon. Next line. I have just learned to my regret--got that?--to my regret that you have already left Summering. Two m's in Summering. And so I must do by letter what I had intended to do in person, that is--faster, Edgar, you don't have to draw each letter--beg your pardon for what I did yesterday. As my mother told you, I am just convalescing from a severe illness and am very excitable. On account of my condition, I often exaggerate things and the next moment I am sorry for it." The back bent over the desk straightened up. Edgar turned in a flash. His defiance had leapt into life again. "I will not write that. It isn't true." "Edgar!" "It is not true. I haven't done anything that I should be sorry for. I haven't done anything bad that I need ask anybody's pardon for. I simply came to your rescue when you called for help." Every drop of blood left her lips, her nostrils widened. "I called for help? You're crazy." Edgar got angry and jumped up from his chair. "Yes, you did call for help, in the corridor, when he caught hold of you. You said, 'Let me go, let me go,' so loud that I heard it in my room." "You lie. I never was in the corridor with the baron. He went with me only as far as the foot of the stairs----" Edgar's heart stood still at the barefacedness of the lie. He stared at her with glassy eyeballs, and cried in a voice thick and husky with passion: "You--were not--in the hall? And he--he did _not_ have his arm round you?" She laughed a cold, dry laugh. "You were dreaming." That was too much. The child, by this time, knew that adults lie and resort to impudent little evasions, lies that slip through fine sieves, and cunning ambiguities. But this downright denial of an absolute fact, face to face, threw him into a frenzy. "Dreaming, was I? Did I dream this bump on my forehead, too?" "How do I know whom you've been rowdying with? But I am not going to argue with you. You are to obey orders. That's all. Sit down and finish the letter." She was very pale and was summoning all her strength to keep on her feet. In Edgar, a last tiny flame of credulity went out. To tread on the truth and extinguish it as one would a burning match was more than he could stomach. His insides congealed in an icy lump, and everything he now said was in a tone of unrestrained, pointed maliciousness. "So I dreamed what I saw in the hall, did I? I dreamed this bump on my forehead, and that you two went walking in the moonlight and he wanted to make you go down the dark path into the valley? I dreamed all that, did I? What do you think, that I am going to let myself be locked up like a baby? No, I am not so stupid as you think. I know what I know." He stared into her face impudently. To see her child's face close to her own distorted by hate broke her down completely. Her passion flooded over in a tidal wave. "Sit down and write that letter, or----"