nine o'clock in the morning
Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether . At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition . His father , a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid , old-fashioned business , had moved in Martin 's boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb , to a house in a garden of trees in another . The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size , which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four . No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred 's , or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school 's traditions . The school meant so many lessons in so many class-rooms , and no more . Hillyard was the only child .