And Otto could find few words to defend the campaign--though he had been able to do it so volubly and confidently to himself. But it was with his father that the great strain came--his father who was watching him with eyes in which love, agony and anger disputed place, and neither of them could speak. He might try, as he did, to cut off gradually all relations with the plotters, for now he called them so to himself. He might, as he did, see more and more clearly that Germany was trying to embroil the United States with Mexico. He might feel that he could put his finger on the human cause of half the explosions in the country, but he dared not speak, for to speak would, he felt, throw him into the hands of the secret service with documentary evidence enough at least to cause his imprisonment--these letters of his, so full of admiration for the country which he realized every day now was steadily marching into war with his own country. The war had brought to no one in Sabinsport so far as great humiliation and wretchedness as to this dabbler in world politics. No small part of his misery was due to his fear that the suspicion abroad in Sabinsport would find its way overseas to the one girl in the world for whom he had ever really cared. Would the intangible thing which followed him in the street find Nancy Cowder in Serbia and poison her loyal and honest mind against him? He had many reasons for knowing how candidly she weighed things. Would she be misled by gossip and the letters he'd been sending her, so full of his own importance in the great work of making America understand Germany? Would Nancy say, like Ralph, "All this does make me understand Germany better, Otto"? He had an awful fear of it. The only consolation was his certainty that she had no other Sabinsport correspondent but her father, and it was unthinkable that her father would write of their quarrel over the munitions contract. CHAPTER V Otto Littman was quite right in thinking that Reuben Cowder would not write his daughter about their quarrel. People might say what they would of Reuben Cowder's business methods, but he never hit below the belt. Moreover, he was too wise to attempt to influence the likes or dislikes of his spirited daughter. He had too great faith in the soundness of her instincts. However deeply she might be interested in Otto--and he feared it was deep indeed--he was confident that she would instinctively know whether he was loyal; and, of course, while she was in Serbia, there was no danger. He was quite right. Nancy was reading between the lines of Otto Littman's letters, and sensing far better than any one in Sabinsport the motives which had involved him in the German intriguing. Besides, she was wholly occupied with her work.