But this had not won him Nancy Cowder, Dick found. A change had come over the girl. She was much quieter. But that might be because of her continuous work at the camp; work which she never left, which, whatever the effort and the strain called for, she always gave. Reuben Cowder was anxious about his daughter, with good reason, and one of his first requests of Dick on his return was to try to bring her to her senses. And yet Dick in his foolish heart argued that it was not the work at all, that her pallor came from pain over a break with Otto; and though many a night he had wild fancies that this was not so, he always told himself in the morning that he was wrong, that it was only a matter of time when the breech between them would be healed, that it was his business to keep away from her. And so, through weeks of labor, Nancy and Dick steadily went their ways, each unconscious of what was in the heart of the other, each valiantly resolved that they would make no sign that would hurt the other, and yet daily each growing closer to the other. CHAPTER XI It is only when one loves a town as Richard Ingraham loved Sabinsport that one is conscious of the currents of unrest, of groping, of joy and of grief that fluctuate through it as truly as they fluctuate through the soul of man or woman. Love makes one sensitive--sensitive to fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan, hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its loftiest aims and hopes. Something more in experience must come to Sabinsport, thought Dick; and he sometimes wondered if it would have to be a baptism of blood. She would stick--stick to the end, he felt. Indeed, he did not believe that all the nations of the earth combined could pry Sabinsport now from the task to which she had put her hand. But he wanted more from her in carrying out this task--a fuller sense of the bigness of the thing in which she was engaged. Where was it all to come from? As the spring drive of the Germans pounded back farther and farther the English and French lines, the anxiety in Sabinsport grew, intensified. Out of it Dick saw coming one emotion that greatly rejoiced him. Sabinsport, through all the war, had never any very strong feeling for England. To Belgium and France she had given her heart, a little of it had gone to Serbia, England never had won more than a slightly grudging recognition; but now, when that amazing army stood with its back to the sea, and the world realized that though every man might fall, no man would surrender, something broke in Sabinsport.