scaped 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
pass