But Annie, after all, was a dream, more and more shadowy. The Reverend Richard Ingraham was not in love with a dream. He did not know it--he who had so often commented privately on the stupidity of his friend Ralph--but he was following Ralph's course, only he, less reasonable, was falling in love with a woman he had never seen. It would not have been so, I am convinced, if there had been in Sabinsport a single girl known to Dick that had the mingling of charm and spirit that was needed to win him. Surely he would have followed her as the needle the pole; but she was not there. The girl that did draw him was a girl overseas, a girl at whose name Sabinsport raised its eyebrows, a girl whose father had described her as "slight and fine and free moving," and whose life, as he had been learning it from her father since their first talk, showed her brave and sweet and unselfish. If I know anything of the ways of the heart, the Reverend Richard Ingraham was falling in love with Nancy Cowder--the horse-racing daughter of Sabinsport's chief pirate. CHAPTER VIII A real and sweet intimacy with Nancy Cowder had been going on in Dick's heart almost unconsciously to himself. It was natural that this should have been so. Curiosity over the girl had been awakened when Patsy McCullon came back from Europe in 1914 and gave an account of her charm, activity and associations--a picture very different from what Sabinsport had quite unconsciously drawn for him. This curiosity had become sympathetic interest when Reuben Cowder had first unburdened himself about his daughter, and this interest had grown warmer and warmer as week after week he read the letters that Nancy was writing her father from Serbia. The nature which revealed itself so frankly in these letters was, Dick realized, something rarely sweet and strong. He grew as the weeks went on to watch for the coming of the letters with scarcely less eagerness than Reuben Cowder himself, and he dreamed much more over them. The girl was taking possession of him without his knowing it. The thought of her was the most fragrant, penetrating and beautiful that came to him.