Hillyard’s life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be.  He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge.  Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether.  At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.

His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin’s boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another.  The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o’clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four.  No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred’s, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school’s traditions.  The school meant so many lessons in so many class-rooms, and no more.

Hillyard was the only child.  Between himself and his parents there was little sympathy and understanding.  He saw them at meals, and fled from the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.

“You never heard of such a jumble of books,” he said to Stella Croyle.  “Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt of Islam, Tennyson.  I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart—­absolutely every line of it, and pages of Browning.  The little brown books!  I would walk miles to pick one of them up.  My people would find the books lying about the house, and couldn’t make head or tail of why I wanted to read them.  There were two red-letter days:  one when I first bought the two volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey.  That’s the author to bowl a boy over.  The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the Confessions—­I could never get tired of them.  I remember buying an ounce of laudanum at a chemist’s on London Bridge and taking it home, with the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to drink it out of a decanter.”

Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now with parted lips.

“And did you?” she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.

Hillyard shook his head.

“The taste was too unpleasant.  I drank about half an ounce and threw the rest away.  I was saved from that folly.”

Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.

“Yes,” she said rather listlessly.

Yet Hillyard might almost have become a consumer of drugs, such queer and wayward fancies took him in charge.  It became a fine thing to him to stay up all night just for the sake of staying up, and many a night he passed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break.  It seemed to him soft and wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie