And so the town came together in a way quite new to it. High Town and the "Emma," Cowder's Point, Jo's Mills, the South Side and the War Board began to connect up as they never had before. It was one of the strange ways in which the Great War reached Sabinsport--stretching her mind to take in facts never before known to her, softening her heart to understand and sympathize where she had been ignorant and hard. It was time that Sabinsport grew together, for the day was close at hand when she was to be called upon to become more than a spectator in the great tragedy. She watched with somber face but steady eye as day after day the proofs piled up that she could no longer do business with Germany. Dick, watching her with the eyes and the heart of a lover, said to himself that when the day came, she could be counted on. He was right. The day that the _Argus_ reported that Germany had again torn up a pledge, that she had announced her return to the practices she had so solemnly sworn to respect, he heard but one thing as he stopped in the groceries, the barber shop, the lobby of the Paradise, and that was, "Of course this means war." Sabinsport took the breaking of diplomatic relations, four days later, almost in silence, but with a growing hardness of eyes and a setting of lips which meant to Dick that she could be relied upon for whatever she might be called upon to do. It was Ralph who at this moment stirred the town. For weeks now he had shut himself away from his friends, even from Dick and Patsy. The _Argus_ had been dull reading. Even those who highly disapproved of Ralph's belligerent attacks on the established order missed his outspoken talk. They had not before appreciated how much zest he had given to life. Ralph had been giving nights and days to the hardest studying and thinking he had ever done. He had been saturating himself with the history of Europe, the philosophies of the contending nations, their ambitions and their procedures. He had succeeded in divesting himself from all personal prejudices and feelings about the war. He had achieved one of the most difficult of human tasks--a completely impersonal, non-partisan attitude toward events which thrilled with human emotion and which involved all of the deepest of human wants and human dreams. He meant to see the thing right, and whatever labor or pain was necessary to see it right he was giving. Gradually it unrolled itself before his mind--the most terrific of human dramas. Like Sabinsport, Ralph had come to hinge his final decision of what the United States should do on whether or no Germany had still enough sense of decency and righteousness in her to keep her given word, and, when she proved she had not, his case was complete.