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: 

“A man can’t serve two passions.  You must give up this championing the weak and lighting flames you can’t control.  See what it leads to!  You’ve got to grow and become a man.  Until then I don’t trust my daughter to you.”

The boy’s lips quivered; a flush darkened his face, ebbed, and left him paler than ever.

Felix felt as if he had hit that face.  Still, anything was better than to leave him under this gruesome obsession!  Then, to his consternation, Derek stood up and said: 

“If I go and see his body at the prison, perhaps he’ll leave me alone a little!”

Catching at that, as he would have caught at anything, Felix said: 

“Good!  Yes!  Go and see the poor fellow; we’ll come, too.”

And he went out to find Nedda.

By the time they reached the street Derek had already started, and they could see him going along in front.  Felix racked his brains to decide whether he ought to prepare her for the state the boy was in.  Twice he screwed himself up to take the plunge, but her face—­puzzled, as though wondering at her lover’s neglect of her—­stopped him.  Better say nothing!

Just as they reached the prison she put her hand on his arm: 

“Look, Dad!”

And Felix read on the corner of the prison lane those words:  ’Love’s Walk’!

Derek was waiting at the door.  After some difficulty they were admitted and taken down the corridor where the prisoner on his knees had stared up at Nedda, past the courtyard where those others had been pacing out their living hieroglyphic, up steps to the hospital.  Here, in a white-washed room on a narrow bed, the body of the big laborer lay, wrapped in a sheet.

“We bury him Friday, poor chap!  Fine big man, too!” And at the warder’s words a shudder passed through Felix.  The frozen tranquillity of that body!