“We’ve seen about Tryst,” Felix said:  “You’ve not done anything?”

Derek shook his head.

“Good!  John, tell Nedda that, and stay with her a bit.  I want to talk to Derek.  We’ll go in the other way.”  He put his hand under the boy’s arm and turned him down into the side street.  When they reached the gloomy little bedroom Felix pointed to the telegram.

“From me.  I suppose the news of his death stopped you?”

“Yes.”  Derek opened the telegram, dropped it, and sat down beside his valise on the shiny sofa.  He looked positively haggard.

Taking his stand against the chest of drawers, Felix said quietly: 

“I’m going to have it out with you, Derek.  Do you understand what all this means to Nedda?  Do you realize how utterly unhappy you’re making her?  I don’t suppose you’re happy yourself—­”

The boy’s whole figure writhed.

“Happy!  When you’ve killed some one you don’t think much of happiness—­your own or any one’s!”

Startled in his turn, Felix said sharply: 

“Don’t talk like that.  It’s monomania.”

Derek laughed.  “Bob Tryst’s dead—­through me!  I can’t get out of that.”

Gazing at the boy’s tortured face, Felix grasped the gruesome fact that this idea amounted to obsession.

“Derek,” he said, “you’ve dwelt on this till you see it out of all proportion.  If we took to ourselves the remote consequences of all our words we should none of us survive a week.  You’re overdone.  You’ll see it differently to-morrow.”

Derek got up to pace the room.

“I swear I would have saved him.  I tried to do it when they committed him at Transham.”  He looked wildly at Felix.  “Didn’t I?  You were there; you heard!”

“Yes, yes; I heard.”

“They wouldn’t let me then.  I thought they mightn’t find him guilty here—­so I let it go on.  And now he’s dead.  You don’t know how I feel!”

His throat was working, and Felix said with real compassion: 

“My dear boy!  Your sense of honour is too extravagant altogether.  A grown man like poor Tryst knew perfectly what he was doing.”

“No.  He was like a dog—­he did what he thought was expected of him.  I never meant him to burn those ricks.”

“Exactly!  No one can blame you for a few wild words.  He might have been the boy and you the man by the way you take it!  Come!”

Derek sat down again on the shiny sofa and buried his head in his hands.

“I can’t get away from him.  He’s been with me all day.  I see him all the time.”

That the boy was really haunted was only too apparent.  How to attack this mania?  If one could make him feel something else!  And Felix said: 

“Look here, Derek!  Before you’ve any right to Nedda you’ve got to find ballast.  That’s a matter of honour, if you like.”

Derek flung up his head as if to escape a blow.  Seeing that he had riveted him, Felix pressed on, with some sternness: