comfortably between sheets.  And then came another twist.  When all the house was quiet, he would slip out of a ground-floor window and roam for hours about the lonely roads, a solitary boy revelling even then in the extraordinary conduct of his life.  There was in the neighbourhood a footpath through a thick grove of trees which ran up a long, high hill, and, midway in the ascent, crossed a railway cutting by a rustic bridge.

“That was my favourite walk, though I always entered by the swing-gate in fear, and trembled at every movement of the branches, and continually expected an attack.  I would hang over that railway bridge, especially on moonlit nights, and compose poems and thoughts—­you know—­great, short thoughts.”  Hillyard laughed.  “I was going to be a poet, you understand—­a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death.  Death was my strong suit.  I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed ‘Lethe,’ but I could never hear that they were published.”

Stella Croyle laughed, and Hillyard went on.  “From the top of the hill I would strike off to the west, and see the morning break over London.  In summer that was wonderful!  The Houses of Parliament.  St Paul’s like a silver bubble rising out of the mist, then, as the mist cleared over the river, a London clean and all silver in the morning light!  I was going to conquer all that, you know—­I—­

     “‘Silent upon a peak of Peckham Rye.’”

“I wonder you didn’t kill yourself,” cried Stella.

“I very nearly did,” answered Hillyard.

“Didn’t your parents interfere?”

“No.  They never knew of my wanderings.  They did know, of course, that I used not to go to bed.  But they left me alone.  I was a bitter disappointment in every way.  They wanted a reasonable son, who would go into the agency business, and they had instead—­me.  I should think that I was pretty odious, too, and we were all of passionate tempers.  Besides, with all this reading, I didn’t do particularly well at school.  How could I when day after day I would march off from the house, leaving a smooth bed behind me in my room?  We were thorny people.  Quarrels were frequent.  My mother had a phrase which set my teeth on edge—­’Don’t you talk, Martin, until you are earning your living’—­the sort of remark that stings and stays in a boy’s memory as something unfair.  There was a great row in the end, one night at ten o’clock, when I was sixteen, and I left the house and tramped into London.”

“What in the world did you do?” cried Stella.

“I shipped as a boy on a fruit-tramp for Valencia in Spain.  And I believe that saved my life.  For my lungs were beginning to be troublesome.”

The fruit-tramp had not been out more than two days when the fo’c’sle hands selected the lad, since he had some education, to be their spokesman on a deputation to the captain.  Martin Hillyard went aft with the men and put their case for better food and less violence.  He was not therefore popular with the old man, and at Valencia he thought it prudent to desert.