"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.
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.