A real and sweet intimacy with Nancy Cowder had been going on in Dick's
heart almost unconsciously to himself. It was natural that this should
have been so. Curiosity over the girl had been awakened when Patsy
McCullon came back from Europe in 1914 and gave an account of her
charm, activity and associations--a picture very different from what
Sabinsport had quite unconsciously drawn for him. This curiosity had
become sympathetic interest when Reuben Cowder had first unburdened
himself about his daughter, and this interest had grown warmer and
warmer as week after week he read the letters that Nancy was writing
her father from Serbia. The nature which revealed itself so frankly in
these letters was, Dick realized, something rarely sweet and strong. He
grew as the weeks went on to watch for the coming of the letters with
scarcely less eagerness than Reuben Cowder himself, and he dreamed much
more over them. The girl was taking possession of him without his
knowing it. The thought of her was the most fragrant, penetrating and
beautiful that came to him.
When the great tragedy came, and she was driven with the host over the
mountains, Dick suffered keenly. Here again his old habit of creating a
picture of the physical surroundings tormented him. The pictures of
what was happening to the girl in that bleak and distracted land came
before his eyes as he went about his daily work, stinging him as an
unexpected shot might have done, or wakened him, shivering, from his
sleep by their horrible realism. His anxiety became so great in the
early part of the year that he had almost persuaded himself to join
Reuben Cowder in his distracted search, when the cablegram came that
Nancy was found. Dick had a vain hope that they might come home soon,
but the first letters destroyed that. It was only by long and careful
nursing that the exhausted vitality would be brought back, and the girl
probably would never again be able to support long strains. Reuben
Cowder was ready and glad, so he wrote, to give up everything else to
the care of his precious girl, even to never coming back again to
America if that were necessary.
Dick had a great sense of loss--one that he did not attempt to analyze
or justify--over these intimations that it might be possible that Nancy
would never again see Sabinsport. When Nikola came, however, a
different face was put on the matter, for he was all confidence that
Miss Nancy would never consent to live away from Sabinsport, that she
loved it above all places, and that the thing that was sustaining her
now was the thought of coming back with her father. They had many rare
talks, these two, and little by little Dick was able to piece together,
down to the last and commonest detail, the weeks of danger and hardship
that the little party had endured. It was a brave, brave tale, and the
more he talked it over with Nikola the prouder he became of Nancy
Cowder, and the quicker his heart beat at the thought of her.
Throughout the months when Sabinsport was full of anxiety over Verdun,
of sorrow over Mikey's death, of more or less irritated activity over
the Border troubles, Dick was daily going about her streets, sharing in
her sorrows and in her perplexities, always deep in his mind and in his
heart the thought of this girl over the seas.
And the girl herself--the last thing that Dick dreamed was that she was
beginning to establish an intimacy with him. It could hardly have been
otherwise. Reuben Cowder had a profound sense of obligation to the
young man. For the first time in many years he had had a confidant. Not
indeed since his wife died had Reuben Cowder talked freely to any
living being. He told this to his daughter. "He is a man," he said,
"that you open your heart to. I don't know why it is, but I knew that I
could go to him and say what I could say to no other man in Sabinsport,
however long I had known him. You get something from him--I don't know
what it is. I suppose it's sympathy and understanding. It is not what
he says, but it's a very real thing, and everybody gets it, everybody
in Sabinsport. When he dropped down there among us at the time of the
accident at the 'Emma,' it was to him that all those poor souls turned,
not to us. Jake Mulligan feels just as I do about it, and so does Tom
Sabins, and so does Nikola and so does John Starrett, and even the Rev.
Mr. Pepper. He's a man--a man that seems to touch everybody. I suppose
he is what you call human--I don't know, but I do know that Sabinsport
is a vastly better place to live in because of Dick Ingraham. Why,
Nancy," he said, "I could never have found you in the world if it had
not been for him. I would not have had the courage. My tongue would
have been tied in my search. I don't know but that's the greatest thing
that Dick Ingraham has done for me--he has loosened my tongue. Nobody
ever did that before for me but your mother."
And so, day after day, as they sat on their terrace overlooking the
blue Mediterranean, the man would talk of Sabinsport and of Dick
Ingraham, and his daughter realized that he was seeing the world
through new eyes--his town, his business, his future; and her heart
grew big with thankfulness to the man that had helped work this
transformation, and more and more eagerly did she look forward to the
time when she should see him, when she should know him and could thank
him.
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."
"She'll never be lonesome here," was Dick's first thought at the sight
of her flying across the lawn to meet the car, a half dozen dogs at her
heels. And his second thought, as they stopped and she stood beside
them, was her father's description of the months before--"so slight and
fine and free-moving."
She was all that--and beautiful, too--a girl of twenty-four, dark hair
and eyes, a high-bred face of delicate features, its fine coloring
heightened by her romp with the dogs and set off by a sweater and tam
as nearly the shade of her cheeks as wool could imitate. She gave a
warm, firm hand to Dick, and looking him frankly in the eye, said:
"Father has told me about you. I am glad you have come to see us."
There was no question of being at home with her. She had so simply and
sweetly taken him in that it was as if he had always known her. It
seemed entirely natural to be walking up to the house with her, to stop
on the veranda and look over the valley, lying now brown and gray with
the broad river glittering through it; to go in to tea before the great
open fire; to talk of all sorts of things, the latest war news, Reuben
Cowder's day in town, the dogs, the telephone talks she had with Patsy,
who was coming out Sunday afternoon with her father and mother, her
meeting with Patsy in London two and a half years ago, the Boys' Club,
Nikola, whom she had run out to see in the morning--"her first morning,
too," thought Dick, with a glow of something like pride.
In the hour, which Dick was always to remember in its every detail,
there was but one alarm. It was when Nancy suddenly asked:
"But how about Otto, Father. Did you see him? Isn't he here? I thought
surely he would telephone me."
Dick thought she looked a little hurt, and he knew Reuben Cowder evaded
when he answered, with a quick and warning look at him, "He's in New
York probably. I didn't ask about him, I was so busy. I will telephone
if you wish," but Nancy said, "No, he must be away or he would have
been out."
It was quite as natural as everything else about it, but it raised a
cloud. "She did not know, then, that Reuben Cowder had quarreled with
Otto. She did not know there was a question in Sabinsport's mind about
his loyalty. And could it be that she cared for him? What more
probable?" If the Reverend Richard Ingraham went home, marveling at the
sweet and wonderful companionship so fully and naturally opened to him,
there was a decided uneasiness running through his exaltation. Did
Nancy Cowder care for Otto Littman? Would she understand the feeling
about him? Would she know, indeed, anything of the stratagem and plots
that the Germans had spun over the country, with what Dick felt was for
the most part decidedly amateurish and bungling skill? Would she
dismiss the suspicions which connected Otto Littman's name with the
intrigues as unfounded and unworthy? Did she care enough to defend him,
womanlike, even if it was finally proved that there was a serious,
nationwide, Germany-inspired conspiracy abroad and that he was
connected with the mischief-making?
It was many months before he was to have satisfactory answers to these
questions. And for the most part they lay at the bottom of his mind,
only working their way for brief, if troubling, moments to the top.
Life was too full, too insistent, too weighty, to give time for
questions that did not require immediate handling.
He saw much of Reuben Cowder and his daughter. The unquestioning,
affectionate acceptance of him as part of their life that had so
rejoiced and overwhelmed him that first day, continued. It was made the
more delightful by the entire naturalness of the Cowders' relations
with Sabinsport. Ralph and Dick discussed it again and again. The town
took them in, and they accepted the town as if there had been no long
black years when Sabinsport had openly scorned the man and his
daughter, while it secretly feared him and envied her; or when Reuben
Cowder hated them all with a Scotch hate because they so utterly
misjudged his beautiful girl.
All of this seemed forgotten now--something childish, not worth recall,
belonging to a day when men and women occupied themselves with lesser
things. The town's suspicions had been washed completely away by the
story of Nancy Cowder's noble sacrifice and brave endurance. They
plumed themselves no little on the fact that she belonged to them. The
change in Reuben Cowder, who, if he owned as much as ever of everything
and ran it with as high hand as ever, did it smilingly and generously,
wiped out fear and old enmities. And as for Nancy and her father, after
you've been where they had been, resentment for neglect and misjudgment
have no part in your soul.
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.
The day after the news came of her insolent announcement that she would
resume her submarine warfare, a full column of the _Argus_ was given to
a double-leaded, signed article. It was an article of vast importance
in Sabinsport, for it put into words the feelings that were within her.
It became her statement of the necessity that she should at last take
part in the Great War. And it gave her, too, some sense of an issue far
greater than the defense of rights.
The article was headed "A Confession and a Good-by," and it began with
a characteristically blunt statement: "As this is the last piece that
the editor will write for the _Argus_ for a long time, he is going to
drop the third person and use the first. That third person always was a
cramping for him as a dress suit." The piece followed.
"I have always tried to say to you as nearly as I could what I
thought about any matter which it seemed to me I should discuss in
this newspaper. I have often failed to say what was in my
mind--sometimes because I attempted to write of things of which I
did not know enough, sometimes because I was determined to force
your attention to things in which you were not interested, and
again because I was more interested in converting you to my ideas
than in attending to my business, which was the expression of those
ideas. But, whether I have failed or succeeded in saying what I
undertook to say, I have tried to be frank, especially since the
war began.
"I don't think there is anybody who reads the _Argus_ who does not
know how the war has affected me. I have tried to believe, and to
persuade others to believe, that Sabinsport need not concern
herself with the war. I tried to talk and act as if we could go on
with our daily lives here as if it were not loose on the earth. I
thought that was our duty--at least, I wanted to think that was our
duty. My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid
out for myself for this town.
"I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her
regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting
to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see
now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force
regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the
size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport
and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making
what he thought would be a perfect world; I had a plan for making a
perfect Sabinsport. And I have been in my way as narrow and as
unreasonable as he.
"You have been both tolerant and kind in your dealings with me. If
this war had not come, I believe that gradually some of my ideas
might have been adopted in Sabinsport; but the war came and, in
spite of my fierce gestures and loud shouting, it swept over us. It
threw me high and dry out of the current of human activities. As
long as I refused, as I did, to go with my kind and take part in
its agonies, it had no place for me. It took me two full years to
discover this, to understand that my wishes and my ways were too
puny for the times.
"I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the
few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual
wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one
man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind
and strength to helping all men and women in this town to
understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all
know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader; but
we all realize that it has been his wisdom and patience and
suffering that has opened our eyes. There has been nobody in
Sabinsport so humble, so ignorant, or, like myself, so selfish that
he was not his friend and counselor. When I finally realized the
hopelessness of my opposition, it was this man who showed me the
vanity and the inhumanity of my position, and who urged me to use
my little training and scholarship in trying to understand how this
human tragedy came about and why there was to-day no finer or
nobler thing than to take a man's part in it. For six months I have
been following his advice.
"I know now that this war came on the world because Germany willed
it. It was necessary to her plans. It is no great trick to show
from her own records why she wanted the war, why she believed she
would win. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that while
she has herself been telling us for forty years why she must have a
war, we have not heeded. The few in France and in England that
believed her were cried down as disturbers of the peace. As for us
Americans, our stupidity has been beyond belief. There is scarcely
a college or university in this country that has not its quota of
men and women, educated in Germany, whose chief ambition has been
to demonstrate the superiority of her scholarship and of her social
system. It was her social machinery that captivated my imagination.
Without ever having seen it in operation, without having any sense
of its relation to her war machine, which she never hesitated to
tell us was her main objective, I, like thousands of others in this
country, accepted and lauded her. I swallowed her whole, because
she insured her sick, her old, and her unemployed. All I knew about
that I gathered from statistics and from observers who had seen in
Germany only what they wanted to see.
"It has taken me all these months to realize what Germany's
invasion of Belgium meant, the abysmal depravity of it. It has
taken me all this time to understand that her attacks on treaties
and laws were attacks on personal freedom.
"I have only to look around in Sabinsport among our own people to
see this. There is Nikola Petrovitch--a sober, honest, industrious
man, who twenty years ago was forced, in order to earn bread for
his wife and children, to leave a country that he loved as well as
any man in Sabinsport loves America. Why should he have been forced
to do this? For no other reason than that Germany and her kind
wanted this land which belonged to Nikola. He loved it so well that
two and a half years ago he went back, and we know what he has been
through since. He and his people were literally swept into the sea
by those who wanted Serbia, wanted her wealth--the things that
belonged to Nikola and Marta and Stana.
"And there are many men and women in Sabinsport from many different
lands, who have been forced to leave these lands. Now it is time
that this kind of thing stopped, and the only way to stop it is for
us to take a hand, and to take a hand at once. All the documents
are in. It is for the President of the United States to declare war
to-day.
"The case is closed for me. This is the last article that I shall
write for the _Argus_ until Germany is conquered. This afternoon I
enlisted in the United States Army, and I hope soon to be doing my
part toward staying the evil which I have so long denied to be
loose on the earth."
It is safe to say that there was nobody in Sabinsport who took the
_Argus_ that did not read that article from start to finish. It is also
safe to say that the one person to whom it meant a thousandfold more
than to anybody else was Patsy McCullon. She read it with exultant
heart and wet eyes, and laid it down only to call the editorial rooms
of the _Argus_. It was Ralph who answered the telephone.
"Ralph," she began, "I--" and her voice broke in sobs.
"Why, Patsy," he said, "what's the matter?"
And then he had a great light, and for the first time in eight months,
the old dominant voice of Ralph Gardner rang out:
"Patsy, I'm coming right out. Will you see me?"
And Patsy uttered a faint and broken, "Ye--s."
* * * * *
Ralph flung himself into his car, and started toward the McCullon farm
at a pace which made those who saw him racing by say: "Something must
have happened. Wonder if there's been an accident." His lips were set,
his eyes flaming, his color high, the great hour of his life was at
hand. He could go to Patsy with a clear, clean purpose--the one to
which she herself was pledged. However long he had been in darkness, he
had reached the light. He need not hang his head before her. Was it too
late? The hot heart chilled at the thought, and the firm hand on the
wheel trembled so that the car swerved almost into the ditch.
It took twenty minutes to make the run for which they all counted
thirty short. It was nearly supper time when he sprang up the steps.
Patsy herself opened the door; cool, serene, her guards all up. Who
would have thought the cheerful, welcoming voice was the same that so
lately had vibrated and broken over the 'phone? Her pose was lost on
Ralph. It was not this but the voice of twenty minutes ago that rang in
his ears. She might fence if she would. He must know--she should not
put him away. He noticed she took him into the more private parlor of
the house, not the family room where at this time Father and Mother
McCullon were almost sure to be. She sensed something then, in spite of
that infernal calm.
Ralph closed the door and disdaining the chair Patsy offered him in
front of the fire, roughly seized her arm.
"Patsy, don't pretend. You know why I'm here. I love you. I want you to
marry me, marry me now. I've enlisted. I leave next week. I want you,
Patsy; want you before I go. Tell me, tell me, quick, Sweet--I must
know, I must know now."
And Patsy, her armor broken and fallen at his first sentence, listened
with thirsty heart. She drank the words like one whose lips are parched
from long desert dryness, and answered by putting her head on his
shoulder and breaking into happy sobs.
A half hour later a tea bell which had sounded twice before was rung
close to the door and Mother McCullon's voice called, "Patsy, your
father's getting impatient."
Patsy put aside Ralph's arms. "We must go, Ralph, and tell them."
"But you haven't said yes, Patsy."
"Why, Ralph Gardner, what do you mean?"
"But I asked you to marry me now--before I go--next week--will you?"
And Patsy sighing happily said, "Yes, Ralph; I don't think I could bear
it unless I were your wife."
They went out arm in arm to break the great news, and were not a little
amazed to see how much as a matter of course the elder people took it.
"It's time you two sillies settled it, I think," said Mother McCullon,
tears and smiles disputing for her eyes.
"I suppose," said Father McCullon, mischievously, "we may call this the
first victory of the war, Ralph. You would never have got her if you
hadn't changed your tune."
But Patsy and Ralph, looking at each other wisely, knew better. The
war--why, what had the war to do with their love? Already the world-old
conviction of true lovers submerged all history. Since time began they
were destined for one another, and neither war nor pestilence could
have kept them apart.
As Ralph demanded, so it was. Four days later there was a wedding at
the farm--a wedding so simple that Mother McCullon was shocked. Both
Ralph and Patsy would have it so. "We have no time for fussing,
Mother," the autocratic young man had declared, and Patsy was as little
concerned. She was going with him. She would find a home as near his
camp as practical. She would stay there as long as practical. To make
this possible without too great inconvenience to those with whom she
worked in school and town, seemed vastly more important than a wedding.
Were not these war times?
But a sweeter wedding never was, so Dick and Nancy and Mary and Tom
Sabins and the half dozen other friends invited said. Everybody was so
happy, everybody so proud, everybody so sure.
"It isn't often that I marry two people," so Dick said to Nancy as they
drove back from the station where they said good-by to the pair,
"without some inward doubts. I haven't a shadow about Patsy and Ralph.
They will work it out."
And Nancy said confidently, "I am sure of it."
Glad as he was for his friends, their marriage and Ralph's enlistment
threw Dick back again into a black and hopeless mood. If he could ease
the pain of his longing for Nancy by getting into the war! If he could
ease his despair from the sentence to inaction by possessing Nancy! He
felt that he was one condemned to eternal loneliness and eternal rust.
More powerfully than ever, as in the distant day when he had sought
Annie and found her dead--or when in August of 1914 he had sought to
make his way into the British Army and had been thrust back, he was
flooded with the conviction that he was doomed never to know the great
realities of life. Not a little of his ache came from the stir that
Ralph's almost primitive attitude toward the war had given him. Ralph,
once convinced that the future of the world was at stake, that it was
at bottom a struggle between men's freedom and slavery, that the event
could only be settled by war, had undergone a startling change in
feeling. He was seized with a passion for the struggle. He wanted to
fight--fight with weapons--with his hands--get at the very throat of
this enemy of men who had so long masqueraded in his mind as their
friend.
It was his thirst for battle that had made him enlist in the ranks.
When Dick had first heard of this decision he had questioned its
wisdom. "Why, Ralph," he said, "you ought to go into an officers' camp.
You'll be needed there."
"No," answered Ralph, "I want the trenches. I'm after the real thing. I
don't want to order--I want to obey. I want the essence of battle, and
I don't believe anybody but the man in the line ever gets it. Then,
too, I've hung back all these months, stupid ass that I was. I want to
begin at the bottom. All right if I can work up, but I want to work up
by doing the thing."
Dick understood. Thus he had felt in those first days before the hope
of a part in the war had been destroyed. He recalled how there had been
hours when he felt that nothing but the sight of his own red blood
flowing would still the passion within him. Ralph was to have a chance
to grapple with death and laugh in her face--the highest thing that
came to men, he somehow felt; and he would never know it.
That he had any more chance of winning Nancy than of being admitted
into the army, he did not believe. She was bound somehow to Otto, of
that he was sure. In the few months she had been at home he had seen
scores of little things that made him think it. He always remembered
with a pang the disappointment he thought he detected at their first
meeting when she had asked for Otto, and her father had told her he was
not in town. He recalled, too, how a few days later, when he was alone
with her, she had told him of seeing Otto the day he returned; how he
seemed depressed, how sorry she was, for he was her oldest, indeed
almost her only, friend in Sabinsport. Dick felt as if she were
sounding him. He gave no sign, only remarking that the war was sad
business for those who had lived in Germany as Otto had and who had
many friends there.
She had never pursued it, but she spoke freely of his visits. He never
felt sure that she sensed that hers was practically the only house in
Sabinsport into which Otto now went. What could make her so interested
but--caring? What could make Reuben Cowder look so grim when Otto was
present or when his name was mentioned but his belief that she did
care? Of one thing he was sure, he must give no sign and he gave none,
though as the spring days went on and the question of our going into
the war was settled and Sabinsport began to prepare to take up her
part, the two were thrown more and more together. It would have been
harder if there had not been so much to do, and if the town had not
taken it so much for granted that whatever the question, it was Dick
who must explain and counsel.