“There isn’t,” said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born. “There’s nowhere else but Charleston worth anything—I don’t know what it is about, but it’s so.”

They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium. It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.

Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.

“This is Vernons,” said he.

89

CHAPTER II

A grosbeak was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate and the warmth of the morning sun was filling the garden with a heart-snatching perfume of jessamine.

Jessamine and the faint bitterness of sun warmed foliage.

It was a garden sure to be haunted by birds; not large and, though well kept, not trim, and sing the birds as loud as they might, they never could break the charm of silence cast by Time on this magic spot.

In the centre of the lawn stood a dial, inscribed with the old dial motto:

The Hours Pass and are Numbered.

Phyl paused for a moment just as she had paused in the street, and Pinckney looking at her noticed again that uptilt of the head, and that far away look as of a person who is trying to remember or straining to hear.

Then a voice from the house came across the broad veranda leading from the garden to the lower rooms.

A female voice that seemed laughing and scolding at the same time.

“Dinah! Dinah! bless the girl, will she never learn sense— Dinah! Ah, there you are. How often have I told you to put General Grant in the 90 sun first thing in the morning?— You’ve been dusting! I’ll dust you. Here, get away.”

90

Out on the veranda, parrot cage in hand, came a most surprising lady. Antique yet youthful, dressed as ladies were wont to dress of a morning in long forgotten years, bright eyed, and wrathfully agitated.

“Aunt,” cried Pinckney. “Here we are.”

The sun was in Miss Pinckney’s 

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