"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.