Stella Croyle had turned towards him again.  There was a vividness in his manner, an enjoyment, too, which laid hold upon her.  It was curious to her to realise that this man talking to her here in the Bayswater Road, had been so lately a ragged youth scouting for his living on the quays of Southern Spain.

“You were at that place—­Alicante!” she cried.

“Part of the time.”

“And there Mario Escobar saw you.  I wonder why he was frightened lest you too should have seen him,” she added slowly.

“Was he?”

“Yes.  He was sitting on the same side of the table as you, so you wouldn’t have noticed.  But he was opposite to me; and he was afraid.”

Hillyard was puzzled.

“I can’t think of a reason.  I was a shipping clerk of no importance.  I can’t remember that I ever came across his name in all the eighteen months I spent in Alicante.”

When Martin Hillyard was nineteen, Death intervened in the family feud.  His parents died within a few weeks of each other.

“I was left with a thousand pounds.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I went to Oxford.”

“You?  After those years of independence?”

“It had been my one passionate dream for years.”

“The Scholar Gipsy,” “Thyrsis,” the Preface to the “Essays in Criticism,” one or two glimpses of the actual city, its grey spires and towers, caught from the windows of a train, had long ago set the craving in his heart.  Oxford had grown dim in unattainable mists, no longer a desire so much as a poignant regret, yet now he actually walked its sacred streets.

“And you enjoyed it?” asked Stella.

“I had the most wondrous time,” Hillyard replied fervently.  “There was one bad evening, when I realised that I couldn’t write poetry.  After that I cut my hair and joined the Wine Club.  I stroked the Torpid and rowed three in my College Eight.  I had friends for the first time.  One above all”

He stopped over-abruptly.  Stella Croyle had the impression of a careless sentinel suddenly waked, suddenly standing to attention at the door of a treasure-house of memories.  She was challenged.  Very well.  It was her humour to take the challenge up just to prove to herself that she could slip past a man’s guard if the spirit moved her.  She turned on Hillyard a pair of most friendly sympathetic eyes.

“Tell me of your friend.”

“Oh, there’s not much to tell.  He rowed in the same boat with me.  He had just what I had not—­traditions.  From his small old brown manor-house in a western county to his very choice of a career, he was wrapped about in tradition.  He went into the army.  He had to go.”

“What is his name?”

Stella Croyle interrupted him.  She was not looking at him any more.  She was staring into the fire, and her body was very still.  But there was excitement in her voice.

“Harry Luttrell,” replied Hillyard, and Stella Croyle did not move.  “I don’t know what has become of him.  You see, I had ninety pounds left out of the thousand when I left Oxford.  So I just dived.”