"I presume you looked at it?" Rupert nodded. "You saw the amount for which it was drawn? What was the amount?" "Five pounds." "What did you do with it?" "I can’t remember. I think I left it on the table with my father’s letter." "What were your movements that morning?" "I don’t see what these questions have got to do with——" Again he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder gripping it tightly. "Answer Sir Reginald, my boy, no matter what he asks you. You can have nothing to hide from him. Tell him frankly everything you did that day, no matter what it was.... We are men, we were young once; we shall understand." Rupert stared across the dimly-lit room. The curtains had not been drawn across the windows, and outside he could see a cluster of fir-trees silhouetted against the sky, a glimpse of the white road bounded on either side by stone walls, and, beyond, the line of moorlands. The twilight had almost gone, and the stars were shining in the sky. He was conscious of a great silence surrounding the house, the silence which always brooded over the hills. Not so many hours ago the roar of London had echoed in his ears, and he had sat in the windows of the lodging-house in Westminster and watched the river of life rushing torrent-like at his feet. Like a swimmer eager to test his strength, he had flung himself into it and been swept away. "We are waiting," Sir Reginald Crichton said. "I don’t know that I did anything in particular," Rupert replied. "I was awaiting the result of my examination. I was out most of the day: it was when I came back that I missed the cheque." "I suppose you had plenty of money to pay the bill at your lodgings and fare down here, or you would have cashed it immediately?" Sir Reginald suggested. "In the last letter you wrote me, Rupert, you told me you were rather hard up. That’s why I sent you the whole of Sir Reginald’s cheque, though I was rather pressed for money myself." Dale spoke under his breath, almost in a whisper. He knew he was not helping his son by what he said, but the truth was dearer to him than anything else. And only by truth could his son be cleared and the mystery surrounding the cheque solved. "I had been lucky," Rupert stammered. "I had made a little bit—at racing." Sir Reginald dropped his pen and moved his chair back. "Oh, so you go in for racing! Forgive me for being interfering, but I shouldn’t have thought you could have afforded that. You must be aware that some time ago your father was forced to mortgage most of the land surrounding his farm, and that I am the mortgagee?" "I told you I had been lucky." "And that’s the reason you treated the cheque your father sent you so carelessly—for, you knew in sending it that he and your sister were depriving themselves of many of the necessities of life." Rupert lost his temper. Sir Reginald was making him feel a cur, making suggestions which he had no right to make; poisoning his father’s mind against him.