“On the contrary, I should expect you to divide your last crust into equal parts between Rita and your four other children,” said Sir Charles with coldness. “But apart from last crusts, which is a rhetorical way of speaking, you had better understand once and for all, my dear Catherine, that my sons and daughter are not to be sacrificed to Rita. If she marries this man, he must keep her. This house is her home, and has been so for twenty years or so, but once she is married, it ceases to be her home. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if Rita is to take the risk of marriage with a man who has nothing to depend on but what he can earn for himself, she had better understand exactly what she is doing. Personally, I consider her entirely unfitted to take such a risk.” “She is more than ready to take any risk. You are perfectly incapable of understanding Rita, Charles, and what a generous, ardent nature she has. And she is very, very much in love, for the first time in her life. You know as well as I do that plenty of people have wanted to marry Rita, and I think it’s wonderful that she should have refused so many offers, to give herself to a man who isn’t rich, simply because she loves him.” “You look upon it as being decided, then?” “Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent--and I shan’t--and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.” She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm: “Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.” He kept his word, as he invariably did. The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later. Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing. Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match. “A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride was making her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines. “So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.” II The same phrase was repeated, and by many people, when Rita and Richard Lambourne came home again, three years later. The great rubber slump had come, and Richard had lost his job. He said that he hoped to find something to do in England. “Professional men of all classes are hoping exactly the same thing at the present moment, all over the country,” said Sir Charles Clyde.