There was also a letter from Ruby Strode, reminding him that he had promised to take her to see the big race that day. Rupert picked up his father’s letter and looked at the cheque. For five pounds only. It was drawn by Reginald Crichton, of Post Bridge Hall, made payable to John Allen Dale. His father had endorsed it. Rupert smiled and fingered the cheque thoughtfully. Five pounds! Quite a lot of money—to his father; probably he did not spend as much in a month. And Rupert’s conscience pricked him. He set his teeth and swept aside the accumulation of unanswered letters and bills. Ruin! An ugly word. He repeated it aloud—and laughed. It savoured of the melodramatic. Yet here was ruin facing him. He looked up and saw it blotting out the sunshine. It had come upon him stealthily, like a thief in the night. And at the same time Love had come, too! Again Rupert laughed. He had only known Miss Strode seven months, but six weeks after their meeting outside the stage-door of the Ingenue Theatre they had been engaged to be married. As Miss Strode’s income—including two matinees—was exactly the same as Rupert’s, marriage was out of the question. Being young and lighthearted and having no idea of the value of time, money or life, they had taken all the gods offered them, living for the day, careless of the morrow. But the to-morrow and the day of reckoning had unexpectedly arrived. For himself Rupert did not care. He could face poverty, failure, even disgrace. But it was of his father he was thinking, and of his sister Marjorie. His father, the old yeoman farmer who had pinched and scraped for seven years now, denying himself and even his daughter the ordinary necessities of life that he might give this only son a good education and make a man and a gentleman of him. As he stood before the dressing-table in his bedroom and commenced to shave it was not the reflection of his own face he saw in the mirror. A vision rose before his eyes of Blackthorn Farm, his humble home in the middle of the wild moorlands, of his father, aged and worn with toil and poverty; of his sister, a girl on the eve of beautiful womanhood. For centuries the Dales had lived at Blackthorn Farm, and when with the passage of time the homestead decayed and threatened to crumble to dust and disappear, so, in the same way, the family of Dales dwindled and decayed, too.