A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping

Failure is bitter enough in itself to a man of energy and strength of purpose, but more bitter still are the humiliations and the sufferings that failure may impose on those he loves.

Reputation, resources, his very home, had been swallowed up, but in Murchison there was that dogged northern spirit, that stubborn uplift against odds, that is at its strongest when confronted with defeat. Like a man brought to the edge of a black cliff at night, he had looked down grimly into the depths, depths that waited not for him alone, but for the innocent children who held his hands.