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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Sick in bed, hey?" he queried, with gruff kind voice. "I guess I am. Who're you?" "I'm Joshua Iden and I've come to pack you out of here," he said. "No!" protested Lane, faintly. "Your wife is downstairs in a taxi waiting," went on his strange visitor. "My wife!" whispered Lane. "Yes. Mel Iden, my daughter. You've forgotten maybe, but she hasn't.
He would never have it said that a dying soldier, who owed neither him nor his daughter anything, had shown more charity than he. Therefore, Lane went early to the Iden homestead, a picturesque cottage across the river from Riverside Park. The only change Lane noted was a larger growth of trees and a fuller foliage. It was warm twilight.
"Here you are.... Let me help.... There. Have you an overcoat?" "No," replied Lane. "Well, there's a robe in the taxi. Come on now. I'll come back and pack your belongings." He put an arm under Lane's and led him out into the hall and down the dim stairway to the street. Under the yellow light Lane saw a cab, toward which Iden urged him.
Swiftly he divined that Mel Iden gloried in the presence of a maimed and proven soldier. "Mel, I'll come to see you," he said, breaking the spell. "Do you still live out on the Hill road? I remember the four big white oaks." "No, Daren, I've left home," she said, with slow change, as if his words recalled something she had forgotten. All the radiance vanished, leaving her singularly white.
In all periods of the progress of the race, war had brought out this instinct in women to give themselves for the future. It was a provision of nature, inscrutable and terrible. How immeasurable the distance between Mel Iden and those women who practised birth control! As the war had brought out hideous greed and baseness, so had it propelled forward and upward the noblest attributes of life.
Dimly, vaguely, they seemed to create vision of long future time; and he divined that good and happiness would come to Mel Iden some day through the pain he had given her. "Where did you say your things are?" he asked. "It's a bad night." "They're in the hall," came in muffled tones from his shoulder. "I'll get them."
As to the iden, persons of the four Imperial ranks received from one hundred to two hundred acres, and persons belonging to any of the five official grades in each of which there were two classes were given from twenty to two hundred, females receiving two-thirds of a male's allotment.
You know I haven't heard much in all these long months. My mother wrote but seldom. Lorna, my kid sister, forgot me, I guess.... Helen always was a poor correspondent. Dal answered my letters, but she never told me anything about home. When we first got to France I heard often from Margie Henderson and Mel Iden crazy kind of letters love-sick over soldiers.... But nothing for a long time now."
It had a neatness and cleanliness that spoke of a woman's care. It had two small windows, one of which was open. Sunshine flooded in, and the twitter of swallows and hum of bees filled the air outside. Lane could scarcely believe his senses. A warm fragrance floated in. Spring! What struck Lane then most singularly was the fact of the silence. There were no city sounds. This was not the Iden home.
I want to marry Mel Iden." "Why?" rasped out the father, hoarsely. "I understand Mel," replied Lane, and swiftly he told his convictions as to the meaning and cause of her sacrifice. "Mel is good. She never was bad. These rotten people who see dishonor and disgrace in her have no minds, no hearts.
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