The Burning Secret

Time was pressing. The baron's holiday would soon come to an end, and the few days that remained must be exploited to the full. There was no use, both he and Edgar's mother felt...

The waiter, after serving Edgar with dinner in his room, closed and locked the door behind him. The child started up in a rage. His mother's doings! She must have given orders f...

The next morning, on entering the hall, the baron saw the son of the beautiful Unknown engaged in an eager conversation with the two elevator boys, to whom he was showing pictur...

Edgar woke up the next morning dazed, wondering whether it had not been a horrid dream, and with the sickly feeling that hangs on after a nightmare, his head leaden and his body...

The tumult of Edgar's conflicting emotions subsided into one smooth, clear feeling of hate and open hostility, concentrated and unadulterated. Now that he was certain of being i...

The train, with a shrill whistle, pulled into Summering. For a moment the black coaches stood still in the silvery light of the uplands to eject a few vivid human figures and to...

They had been looking for him in Bains for some time. His mother, in spite of her anger, had been alarmed when he did not return, and had had search made for him all over Summer...

The baron had passed a bad night. It is rather vain to attempt to sleep after an adventure that has been abruptly broken off. Tossing on his bed and starting up out of oppressiv...

"What has made them so different?" the child pondered while sitting opposite them in the carriage. "Why don't they behave toward me as they did at first? Why does mamma avoid my...

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 pl...

The plan, as appeared only an hour later, proved to be excellent. It worked without a hitch. The baron chose to be a little late in entering the dining-room, and when Edgar saw...

After he had put a long stretch of road between him and the hotel, Edgar stopped running. He was panting heavily, and he had to lean against a tree to get his breath back and re...

When the train pulled into the station at Bains, the street lamps were already lit, and though the station was bright with its red and white and green signals, Edgar unexpectedl...

Edgar's mother stayed at table with the baron a while longer. But the two no longer spoke of elephants or hunting. An indefinable embarrassment instantly sprang up between them,...

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 adv...