“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?”