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.