It was not until late in the fall that definite assurance of a quick return came to Dick. An exultant letter from Reuben Cowder told him they were leaving their nook on the sea for London, and that as soon as it could be arranged they would sail for home. The certainty that Nancy was coming, that he should meet her, after all these long months of intimacy with her, filled him with an unreasoning kind of dread. Might it not be that he would discover that he must give up this lovely thing that he had been treasuring in his heart? It was as if he had been growing in some shady, secret corner of his garden a delicate and rare plant, and that the time had come when he must take it into the full sun, and he feared what the change might do--feared lest it was something that could not endure the wide, roaring out of doors. There was a real dread in his heart when, without warning, one night early in December, he listened to a cheerful voice which he scarcely recognized, calling to him over the telephone, "Hello, Ingraham!--this is Cowder--how are you?" and as he accepted the hearty invitation to "come out with me to-morrow afternoon and meet my girl." Dick found his friend much changed. Reuben Cowder had been what Sabinsport called a "sour" man, a "hard" man. He had never talked except when it was necessary, and then so straight to the point, so bluntly and finally, that those familiar with him feared his silence less than his words. He had a smile which was so rare, so joyless, that one would rather he frowned, for the smile made one sorry for him and uneasy lest one's judgment of him as cruel, greedy and unfeeling might, after all, need qualification. He had a way of walking with his eyes on the ground. Ralph said it was so nothing would distract his attention from his eternal scheming to "do" Sabinsport. This stoop in his walk, his grizzled hair, his stern face, made him look old--a "hard old man" he was frequently called. No one would have described him now as old, and this in spite of the fact that his hair was perfectly white--one of the results of his weeks of torture over Nancy's fate. Nothing was more noticeable about him now than that he walked erect with head well back and eyes that shone. If he talked but little more, he smiled freely and indiscriminately at all the world. The change in him was a nine days' wonder to the town. To Dick, dining at his side out at the farm, it was a miracle. "It's a resurrection of things all but dead in him," he thought to himself, "a marvel that only love and joy could work." "I've told Nancy," said Reuben Cowder, "that you are the best friend I ever had, that if it hadn't been for you I don't believe I ever would have found her--wouldn't have had the courage and faith. So, you see, she is very anxious to see you, and I want you to like her. She's going to stay here now, she says, with me, and I don't want her to be lonesome."