To wait in anxiety is perhaps the hardest thing in life; tea, tobacco, and hot baths perhaps the only anodynes.  These, except the baths, they took.  Without knowing what had happened, neither John nor Felix liked to make inquiry at the police station, nor did they care to try and glean knowledge from the hotel people by questions that might lead to gossip.  They could but kick their heels till it became reasonably certain that Derek was not coming back.  The enforced waiting increased Felix’s exasperation.  Everything Derek did seemed designed to cause Nedda pain.  To watch her sitting there, trying resolutely to mask her anxiety, became intolerable.  At last he got up and said to John: 

“I think we’d better go round there,” and, John nodding, he added:  “Wait here, my child.  One of us’ll come back at once and tell you anything we hear.”

She gave them a grateful look and the two brothers went out.  They had not gone twenty yards when they met Derek striding along, pale, wild, unhappy-looking.  When Felix touched him on the arm, he started and stared blankly at his uncle.

“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!”