"What's a shame?" asked Hilda.

"Why aren't they decorating you? You're the bravest of the lot."

"By no means," said Hilda; "those [58]two women deserve all that is coming to them. I am glad they are getting their pretty ribbon."

[58]

With a sudden nervous gesture, Barkleigh unfastened the bright decorations on his chest, and placed them in Hilda's hand.

"Take them and wear them," he said, "I have no heart for them any more. They are yours."

"I didn't win them, so I can't wear them," she answered, and started to hand them back.

"No, I won't take them back," he said harshly, brushing her hand from him, "if you won't wear them, keep them. Hide them, throw them away. I'm done with them. I can't wear them any more since that afternoon in Nieuport."

Hilda pinned the ribbons upon his coat.

"I decorate you," she said, "for, verily, you are now worthy."

 THE BELGIAN REFUGEE

By acts not his own, his consciousness is crowded with horror. Names of his ancient cities which should ring pleasantly in his ear—Louvain, Dinant, Malines: there is an echo of the sound of bells in the very names—recall him to his suffering. No indemnity will cleanse his mind of the vileness committed on what he loved. By every aspect of a once-prized beauty, the face of his torment is made more clear. Of all that fills the life of memory—the secure home, the fruitful village and the well-loved land—there is no acre remaining where his thought can rest. Each remembered place brings a sharper stroke of poignancy to the mind that is dispossessed.

His is a mental life uprooted and flung out into a vast loneliness. Where can his thought turn when it would heal itself? To the disconsolate there has always been [60]comfort in recalling the early home where childhood was nourished, the orchard and the meadow where first love came to the meeting, the eager city where ambition, full-panoplied, sprang from the brain. The mind is hung with pictures of what once was. But there must always be a local habitation for these rekindled heats. Somewhere, in scene and setting, the boy played, the youth loved, the man struggled. That richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. No 

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