As Ralph looked out over the not too fruitful fields which his father had reclaimed from the waste with such infinite toil, and at the sacrifice of all his savings, he forgot the fair face of Dorothy Hamblyn, which had been haunting him all the way back, and remembered only the iron hand of her father. CHAPTER V THE CHANCES OF LIFE Ralph had started so early that morning that he had had no time to get breakfast. Now he began to feel the pangs of hunger most acutely. "I expect mother will have kept something for me," he said to himself, as he descended the slope. "I hope she is not worrying about what has become of me." He looked right and left for his father, expecting to find him at work in the fields, but David was nowhere in evidence. Ralph made a bee-line across the fields, and was soon in the shelter of the little homestead. He found his father and mother and his sister Ruth still seated at the breakfast-table. Ruth pushed back her chair at the sound of his footsteps and rose to her feet. "Why, Ralph," she said, "where have you been? Mother's been quite worried about you." "If that's all she has to worry her, she needn't worry much," he said, with a laugh. "But has anything happened? You all look desperately sober." "We've heard some news that has made us all feel very anxious," David answered wearily. "We've sat here talking about it for the last half-hour." "Then the news concerns us all?" Ralph questioned, with a catch in his voice. "Very closely, my boy--very closely. The truth is, Julian Seccombe has got wounded out in Egypt." "And he's the last life on the farm?" Ralph questioned, with a gasp. "That is so, my boy. It seems strange that I should be so unfortunate in the choice of lives, and yet I could not have been more careful. Who could have thought that the parson's boy would become a soldier?" "Life is always uncertain," Ralph answered, with a troubled look in his eyes, "whether a man is a soldier or a farmer." "That is so," David answered reflectively. "Yet my father held his little place on only two lives, and one of them lived to be seventy-five." "But, even then, I've heard you say the lease ran only a little over sixty years. It's a wicked gamble, is this leasehold system, with the chances in favour of the landlord." "Why a gamble in favour of the landlord, my boy?" David questioned, lifting his mild eyes to his son's face. "Why, because if all the 'lives' live out their threescore years and ten, the lease is still a short one; for you don't start with the first year of anyone's life." "That is true," David answered sadly. "The parson's boy was ten, which I thought would be balanced by the other two." "And the other two did not live ten years between them." "Of course, nobody could foresee that," David answered sadly. "They were both healthy children. Our little Billy was three, and the healthiest baby of the lot." "But with all the ailments of children in front of him?"