"On the night that Mr. Kenwick was reported dead."
A murmur that was distinctly a wave of sympathy filled the chamber. But eagerness to catch the next question quieted it.
"After that first letter telling you about the prisoner's misfortune, did you ever hear from Mr. Everett Kenwick again?"
"Only once. Just a week before he died, he wrote again. He had just lost his wife and he seemed to have a premonition that he was not going to live very long."
She was feeling for her handkerchief in the pocket of the fur-trimmed coat. Some of the men in the court-room averted their eyes. The face of more than one woman softened. Clinton Morgan sat regarding his sister with a curious composure. In his eyes was that mixture of compassion and awe that he had worn on the night when the gold and ivory book had betrayed to him her secret.
"Yes?" Dayton went on gently, but with the same relentless persistence. "He wrote to you again? And what did he say?"
"He said that he wanted me to have something that had belonged—to his brother. He told me that he felt that Roger Kenwick would have wished me to have it. And with the letter there came a box in which I found——"
She had finished her search in the pocket of the motor-coat, and now she held something between her gloved fingers. "Mr. Everett Kenwick himself had only received it a short time before. There had been some delay and confusion about it, owing I suppose to his brother having been sent home—in just the way that he was. He himself never knew that he had won it. But it was such a wonderful display of courage——And the French officer whose life he had saved sent a letter, too, saying that France was grateful and wanted to express her appreciation in some way so——"
And then she held it up before them; before the lawyers and the jury and the crowd of spectators—a bit of metal on its patch of ribbon. Holding it out before them, she sat there like a sovereign waiting to confer a peerage. And not the judge's gavel nor the commanding voice of the district attorney could still the tumult that rose and swelled into tumultuous applause.