properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account—that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.

In Edgar there had been a heavily fraught, unexpended emotion lying in wait, which now burst out and rushed to meet the first human being who seemed to deserve it. He lay in the dark, happy and dazed. He wanted to laugh, but had to cry. For he loved the baron as he had never loved friend, father, mother, or even God. All the immature passion of his ending boyhood wreathed itself about his mental vision of the man whose very name had been unknown to him a few hours before.

He was wise enough not to be disturbed by the peculiar, unexpected way in which the new friendship had been formed. What troubled him was the sense of his own unworthiness and insignificance. “Am I fit company for him?” he plagued himself. “I, a little boy, twelve years old, who has to go to school still and am sent off to bed at night before anyone else? What can I mean to him, what have I to offer him?”

The painful sense of his impotence to show his feelings in some way or other made him most unhappy. On other occasions, when he had taken a liking for a boy, the first thing he had done was to offer to share his stamps and marbles and jacks. Now such childish possessions, which only the day before had still had vast importance and charm in his eyes, had depreciated in value. They seemed silly. He disdained them. He couldn’t offer such things to his new friend. What possible way was there for him to express his feelings? The sense that he was small, only half a being, a mere child of twelve, grew upon him and tortured him more and more. Never before had he so vehemently cursed his childhood, or longed so heartily to wake up in the morning the person he had always dreamed of being, a man, big and strong, grown up like the others.

His restless thoughts were mixed with the first bright dreams of the new world of manhood. Finally he fell asleep with a smile on his lips, but his sleep was constantly broken by the anticipation of the next morning’s appointment. At seven o’clock he awoke with a start, fearful that he was too late already. He dressed hastily and astonished his mother when he went in to say good-morning because she had always had difficulty getting him out of bed. Before she could question him he was out of her room again.

With only the one thought in his mind, not to keep his friend waiting, he dawdled about downstairs in the hotel, even forgetting to eat breakfast.

At half-past nine the baron came sauntering down the lobby with his easy air and no indication that anything had been troubling him. He, of course, had completely forgotten the appointment for a walk, but he acted as though he were quite ready to keep his promise when the boy came rushing at him so eagerly. He took Edgar’s arm and paced up and down the lobby with him leisurely. Edgar was radiant, although the baron gently but firmly refused to start on the walk at once. He seemed to be waiting for something. Every once in a while he gave a nervous glance at one of the various doors. Suddenly he drew himself up. Edgar’s mother had entered the hall.

She responded to the baron’s greeting and came up to him with a pleasant expression on her face. Edgar had not told her about the walk. It was too precious a thing to talk about. But now the baron mentioned it and she smiled in approval. Then he went on to invite her to come along, and she was not slow in accepting.

That made Edgar sulky. He gnawed at his lips. How provoking of his mother to have come into the lobby just then! The walk belonged to him and him alone. To be sure, he had introduced his friend to his mother, but only out of courtesy. He had not meant to share him with anybody. Something like jealousy began to stir in him when he observed the baron’s friendliness to his mother.

On the walk the dangerous sense the child had of his importance and sudden rise to prominence was heightened by the interest the two adults showed in him. He was almost the exclusive subject of their conversation. His mother expressed rather hypocritical solicitude on account of his pallor and nervousness, while the baron kept saying it was nothing to worry about and extolled his young “friend’s” good manners and pleasant ways.

It was the happiest hour of Edgar’s life. Rights were granted him that he had never before been allowed. He was permitted to take part in the conversation without a prompt “keep quiet, Edgar.” He could even express bold desires for which he would have been rebuked before. No wonder the deceptive feeling that he was grown up began to flourish in his imagination. In his bright dreams childhood already lay behind him like a suit he had outgrown and cast off.

At the mother’s invitation, the baron took his mid day meal at their table. She was growing friendlier all the time. The vis-à-vis was now a companion, the acquaintanceship a friendship. The trio was in full swing, and the three voices, the woman’s, the man’s and the child’s, mingled in harmony.

CHAPTER IV

THE ATTACK

THE impatient hunter felt the time had come to creep up on his game. The three-sidedness of the sport annoyed him, and so did the tone of it. To sit there and chat was rather pleasant, but he was after more than mere talk. Social intercourse, with the mask it puts over desire, always, he knew, retards the erotic between man and woman. Words lose their ardor, the attack its fire. Despite their conversation together on indifferent matters, Edgar’s mother must never forget his real object, of which, he was quite convinced, she was already aware.

That his efforts to catch this woman were not to prove in vain seemed very probable. She was at the critical age when a woman begins to regret having remained faithful to a husband she has never truly loved, and when the purple sunset of her beauty still affords her a final urgent choice between motherliness and womanliness. The life whose questions seem to have been answered long before becomes a problem again, and for the last time the magnetic needle of the will wavers between the hope for an intense love experience and ultimate resignation. The woman has a dangerous decision to confront, whether she will live her own life or that of her children, whether she will be a woman first, or a mother first.

The baron, who was very perspicacious in these matters, thought that he discerned in Edgar’s mother this very vacillation between passion to live her own life and readiness to sacrifice her desires. In conversation she always omitted to mention her husband. Evidently he satisfied nothing but her bare external needs and not the snobbishness that an aristocratic way of living had excited in her. And as for her son, she knew precious little of the child’s soul. A shadow of boredom, wearing the veil of melancholy in her dark eyes, lay over her life and obscured her sensuousness.

The baron resolved to act quickly, yet at the same time to avoid any appearance of haste. Like an angler, who tempts the fish by dangling and withdrawing the bait, he would affect a show of indifference and let himself be courted while he was the one that was actually doing the courting. He would put on an air of haughtiness and bring into sharp relief the difference in their social ranks. There was fascination in the idea of getting possession of that lovely, voluptuous creature simply by stressing his pride, by mere externals, by the use of a high-sounding aristocratic name and the adoption of a cold, proud manner.

The chase was already growing hot. He had to be cautious and not show his excitement. So he