storing hex from text file into byte array

Question

how would i go about taking characters from a text and storing them in a byte array? by hex characters i mean the text file reads "00 9A 6F AE" etc. etc.

does system.io.streamreader only store data as strings?

and id like to store it in a byte[], instead of manually typing
{ 0x00, 0x9a, 0x6f, 0xae } into the code itself.

thanks,
mythos