il 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.

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 re