"I should like you to hear it."
"Come out of the darkness, Don, please!" begged his sister again.
The others echoed the wish, and Brown, yielding against his will—somehow he had never wanted more to remain in the shadow—took a chair at one end of the hearth, where he was in full view of them all. "It was given me," said Brown, speaking in a tone which instantly arrested even Hugh Breckenridge's careless attention, though why it did so he could not have said, "by a man whose son was wearing it when he stood on a plank between two windows, ten stories up in the air, and passed fifteen girls over it to safety. Then—the plank burned through at one end. He had known it would."
There fell a hush upon the little group. Mrs. Brainard put out her hand and touched Brown's shoulder caressingly.
"No wonder you wouldn't exchange it, Don," she said, very gently.
"Was the father at your dinner, Don?" Doctor Brainard asked, after a minute.
"Yes, Doctor."
"So you wore it to please him," commented Sue.
"He wore it," said Helena Forrest, "as a man might wear the
Victoria Cross."
"Ah, but I didn't earn it," denied Brown, without looking up.