Now, it is not to be supposed that interested and heartened as the Rev. Richard Ingraham really was in all these changes that had come over Sabinsport, that they either satisfied his heart or filled his mind. Night and day, one thought absorbed him, stronger than all others, one feeling mounted higher and higher. He thought he had put behind in the weeks of rest in the South--his love for Nancy Cowder. He thought he had had it out with himself. He believed he had made his renunciation, that he could come back, work with her in camp and town, go out as usual to the farm on Monday afternoons, meet her easily and naturally everywhere, even see outwardly unmoved the day come which he believed thoroughly would come, when she would marry Otto Littman. And, though it is improbable that he could have gone through the ordeal with anything like the control and certainty that he had persuaded himself was possible, yet such is my confidence in the man that I believe he would have put it through if, when he returned, he had not divined, rather than learned, that there had been a great change in the relations of Otto and Nancy. It was not a change, so far as he could judge, from which he had a right to draw hope. He told himself again and again that, on the contrary, the change probably only meant that later, when the war was over perhaps, when suspicion of Otto had passed and Nancy was released from her labors in the camp, that again they would seek each other; yet the fact that at this moment they were not seeking each other, that so far as he could make out, they were not seeing each other, gave Dick an unreasoning encouragement. In spite of himself, his dreams came back. In spite of himself he saw more and more of Nancy Cowder. What had happened with Otto, he could not make out. Otto still remained in town. It was certain that Reuben Cowder, as well as other leading men who once had shunned him, were taking pains to support him. It was evident that a great burden had been raised from Rupert Littman's heart. Never had he been so affectionate, so proud of Otto as now. That is, at the very head of Sabinsport business, where suspicion of Otto had first begun, there had been a great change. These men, if you asked them, would tell you that they knew it to be a fact, from the very highest authority, that Otto Littman had rendered the Secret Service of the United States a tremendous service; they knew it to be a fact that he had run the danger of losing his own life in order to save the lives of others. That was as far as they would go--as a matter of fact, that was as far as they could go. But the authority on which these facts were stated was so unimpeachable that there was not a man of them that doubted, and there was not a man of them that was not doing his best for Otto.