Walking over to the mantel, Laurie rested an elbow heavily upon it, and for the first time looked squarely from one to the other of his friends. As he looked, he tried to speak. They saw the effort and its failure, and understood both. With a gesture of hopelessness, he turned his back toward them, and stood with sagging muscles and eyes fixed on the empty grate. Epstein's nerves snapped.
"For God's sake, Devon," he begged, "cut out the vaits! Tell us vot you got on your chest, and tell it quick."
Laurie turned and once more met his eyes. Under the look Epstein's oblique eyes shifted.
"I'm going to," Laurie said quietly and still in those new, flat tones. "That's why I've brought you here. But—it's a hard job. You see,"—his voice again lost its steadiness—"I've got to hurt you—all of you—most awfully. And—and that's the hardest part of this business for me."
Doris, now staring up at him, told herself that she could not endure another moment of this tension. She dared not glance at either of the others, but she heard Epstein's heavy breathing and the creak of Rodney Bangs's chair as he suddenly changed his position. Again it was Epstein who spoke, his voice rising on a shriller note.
"Vell! vell! Get it out! I s'pose you done something. Vot you done?"
For the first time Laurie's eyes met those of Doris. The look was so charged with meaning that she sat up under it as if she had received a shock. Yet she was not sure she understood it. Did he want her to help him? She did not know. She only knew now that the thing she had feared was here, and that if she did not speak out something in her head would snap.
"He killed Herbert Shaw," she almost whispered.
For a long moment there was utter silence in the room, through which the words just spoken seemed to scurry like living things, anxious to be out and away. Laurie, his eyes on the girl, showed no change in his position, though a spasm crossed his face. Epstein, putting up one fat hand, feebly beat the air with it as if trying to push back something that was approaching him, something intangible but terrible. Bangs alone seemed at last to have taken in the full meaning of the curt announcement. As if it had galvanized him into movement, he sprang to his feet and, head down, charged the situation.
"What the devil is she talking about?" he cried out. "Laurie! What does she mean?"