inia creeper. He parted this leafy screen,
bending back the springing fronds that thrust against the flimsy muslin
of her gown and threatened to spear the pink-rosed hat that cast an
adorable warm tint over her creamy face, thinking that never had the old
place seen such a picture as she made framed in the deep green.

Some such thought was in the major's mind, too, as he came slowly up the
terrace below. He paused, to take off his hat and wipe his brow.

"With the place all fixed up this way," he sighed to himself, "I could
believe it was only last week that Beauty Valiant and Southall and I
were boys, loafing around this gyarden. And to think that now it's
Valiant's son and Judith's daughter! Why, it seems like yesterday that
Shirley there was only knee-high to a grasshopper--and I used to tell
her her hair was that color because she ran through hell bareheaded. I'm
about a thousand years old, I reckon!"

Meanwhile the two figures above had pushed through the tangle into a
circular sunny space where stood a short round pillar of red onyx. It
was a sun-dial, its vine-clad disk cut of gray polished stone in which
its metal tongue was socketed. Round the outer edge of the disk ran an
inscription in archaic lettering. Valiant pulled away the clustering ivy
leaves and read: _I count no hours but the happy ones_.

"If that had only been true!" he said.

"It is true. See how the vines hid the sun from it. It ceased to mark
the time after the Court was deserted."

He snapped the clinging tendrils and swept the cluster from its stone
face. "It shall begin to count again from this moment. Will it mark only
happy hours for me, I wonder? I'll bribe it with flowers."

"White for happiness," she said.

"I'll put moonflowers at its base and where you are standing, Madonna
lilies. The outer part of the circle shall have bridal-wreath and white
irises, and they shall shade out into pastel colors--mauves and grays
and heliotropes. Oh, I shall love this spot!--perhaps sometime the best
of all."

"Which do you love the most now?"

He leaned slightly toward her, one hand on the dial's time-notched rim.
"Don't you know?" he said in a lower voice. "Could any other spot mean
to me what that acre under the hemlocks means?"

Her face was turned from him, her fingers pulling at the drifting vine,
and a splinter of sunlight tangled in her hair like a lace of fireflies.

"I could never forget it," he continued. "The thing that spoile