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?”