“Why, Bill, it’s poetry.  She’s written here on the margin, ’Verses by our Doctor friend.  I thought you’d like to see them.  See other sheet for melody to suit.  It was the melody he tried to whistle that night.  He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor’s words.’” Then Henry unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, was the air, evidently copied by the girl from the melody written by the Gilded Youth.  And clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovski melody from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, that dominated the air.[Footnote:  For the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote to the Young Doctor’s verses the reader should see appendix “A.”] The fine thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that air back to her, and to play the game of courage to us!  Henry read the verses; they were headed “A Soldier’s Song.”  They were very much such rhymes as we wrote when we were young.  They ran: 

   Love, though these hands, that rest in thine so dear,
   Back into dust may crumble with the year;
   Love, though these lips, that meet thy lips so true,
   Soon may be grass that stores the morning dew—­
   O Love, know well, that this fond heart of mine,
   It shall be always, always—­thine!

   Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but this;
   Love, though our faith shall be our rarest bliss;
   Love, though the years may bring their death and chill,
   Love, though our blood shall lose its passion, still—­
   Still, Love, know well that this heart is divine,
   It shall be always—­always, thine!

Henry sat holding the sheet and looking through the wall of the room in Buckland’s hotel across twenty years, down an elm-shaded path in the little town of Baldwin, Kansas—­thousands of miles and seemingly thousands of years away!

“Well,” he sighed.  “In the note here she’s got her he’s badly mixed.  But we know what she means.  And I don’t blame them; any boy in his twenties ought to go singing, with one voice or another, after such a girl!”

And then we knew what the Young Doctor was doing there in the garden among the adoring flowers.  He was writing those verses.  And, we in our forties, after such things have passed, were sitting in a commonplace room in a comfortable hotel, five hundred miles from the battle and twenty years from the primrose path, trying to imagine it all.  And like Stephen Blackpool in Dickens’ “Hard Times” about all we could make of it was that it was a mess!  They were both so remote, the love affair that had followed us over Europe, and the war which we had followed so wearily.  The love affair was of course a look backward, for us, to days “when lutes were touched and songs were sung”; but the war and all its significance stretched ahead.  It portended change.  For change always follows war.