He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion swimmer, and _facile princeps_ in the ineptitudes of the classics; and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within the school curriculum.

Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.
All else was wrapt in mystery ...

at any rate it was a mystery I have no wish to lay bare.

The death and the inquest verdict, "Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions.

Sir Meldrum Fraser died a year after his son.