"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
passed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even
dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break. It seemed to him soft and
wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie 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