Poverty—­grinding, unceasing, uninteresting poverty, had been Sir Marmaduke’s relentless tormentor ever since he had reached man’s estate.  His father, Sir Jeremy de Chavasse, had been poor before him.  The younger son of that Earl of Northallerton who cut such a brilliant figure at the Court of Queen Elizabeth, Jeremy had married Mistress Spanton of Acol Court, who had brought him a few acres of land heavily burdened with mortgage as her dowry.  They were a simple-minded, unostentatious couple who pinched and scraped and starved that their two sons might keep up the appearances of gentlemen at the Court of King Charles.

But both the young men seemed to have inherited from their brilliant grandfather luxurious tastes and a love of gambling and of show—­but neither his wealth nor yet his personal charm of manner.  The eldest, Rowland, however, soon disappeared from the arena of life.  He married when scarce twenty years of age a girl who had been a play-actress.  This marriage nearly broke his doting mother’s heart, and his own, too, for the matter of that, for the union was a most unhappy one.  Rowland de Chavasse died very soon after, unreconciled to his father and mother, who refused to see him or his family, even on his deathbed.

Jeremy de Chavasse’s few hopes now centered on his younger son, Marmaduke.  In order to enable the young man to remain in London, to mix freely and to hold his own in that set into which family traditions had originally gained him admittance, the fond mother and indulgent father denied themselves the very necessities of life.

Marmaduke took everything that was given him, whilst chafing at the paucity of his allowance.  Determined to cut a figure at Court, he spent two years and most of his mother’s dowry in a vain attempt to capture the heart of one or the other of the rich heiresses who graced the entourage of Charles I.

But Nature who had given Marmaduke boundless ambition, had failed to bestow on him those attributes which would have helped him on towards its satisfaction.  He was neither sufficiently prepossessing to please an heiress, nor sufficiently witty and brilliant to catch the royal eye or the favor of his uncle, the present Earl of Northallerton.  His efforts in the direction of advantageous matrimony had earned for him at Court the nickname of “The Sparrowhawk.”  But even these efforts had soon to be relinquished for want of the wherewithal.

The doting mother no longer could supply him with a sufficiency of money to vie with the rich gallants at the Court, and the savings which Sir Jeremy had been patiently accumulating with a view to freeing the Acol estates from mortgage went instead to rescue young Marmaduke from a debtor’s prison.

Poor Sir Jeremy did not long survive his disappointment.  Marmaduke returned to Acol Court only to find his mother a broken invalid, and his father dead.

Since then it had been a perpetual struggle against poverty and debt, a bitter revolt against Fate, a burning desire to satisfy ambition which had received so serious a check.