a silent canopy of mauve
and purplish blue. The moon drowsed between the trees like a great
yellow moth, and the shadows of the branches lay on the ground like
sharp bluish etchings on light green paper. Behind them Damory Court lay
a nest of woven music and laughter. The long white-muslined porch
shimmered goldenly, and beside it under the lanterns dallied a
flirtatious couple or two, ghost-like in the shadows.

Peace brooded over all, a vast sweet silence creeping through the
trees--only here and there the twitter of a waking bird--and around them
was the glimmer of tall flowers standing like pensive moon-worshipers in
an ecstasy of prayerless bloom.

"Come," he said. "Let me take you to see the sun-dial now."

The tangle had been cut away and a narrow gravel-path led through the
pruned creepers. She made an exclamation of delight. The onyx-pillar
stood in an oasis of white--moonflowers, white dahlias, mignonette and
narcissus; bars of late lilies-of-the-valley beyond these, bordered with
Arum-lilies, white clematis, iris and bridal-wreath, shading out into
tender paler hues that ringed the spotless purity like dawning passion.

"White for happiness," he quoted. "You said that when you brought me
here--the day we planted the ramblers. Do you remember what I said? That
some day, perhaps, I should love this spot the best of all at Damory
Court." He was silent a moment, tracing with his finger the motto on the
dial's rim. "When I was very little," he went on,--"hardly more than
three years old, I think,--my father and I had a play, in which we lived
in a great mansion like this. It was called Wishing-House, and it was in
the middle of the Never-Never Land--a sort of beautiful fairy country in
which everything happened right. I know now that the Never-Never Land
was Virginia, and that Wishing-House was Damory Court. No wonder my
father loved it! No wonder his memory turned back to it always! I've
wanted to make it as it was when he lived here. And I want the old dial
to count happy hours for me."

Something had crept into his tone that struck her with a strange sweet
terror and tumult of mind. The hand that clutched her skirts about her
knees had begun to tremble and she caught the other hand to her cheek in
a vague hesitant gesture. The moonflowers seemed to be great round eyes
staring up at her.

"Shirley--" he said, and now his voice was shaken with longing--"will
you make my happiness for me?"

She was standi