The shadow on the sun-dial, blue upon its white-marble surface, marked four o'clock, but its edge was broken by the irregular silhouette of an encroaching rose-bush. The sun-dial in the midst of the wide, sunny garden, the old red-brick house among the elms--these were the most sharply defined elements of Mark Faraday's picture of home. Born in Italy, for most of his young life a sojourner in foreign lands, he yet remembered being utterly happy at "Aunt Lucretia's" when at seven he had made his first visit to his mother's country. That memory had never faded. He had recalled and reclaimed each detail of its serene charm at his second visit ten years later, after his mother's death. And now in America again, he had naturally gravitated toward the old place. The young man gave a careless friendliness to his faded little aunt, and spent long hours with his dreams, creative and subjective, in her garden. For the most part they were dreams of unheard melodies, for Mark Faraday was a composer. So little of his life had been spent in his own country that outside the garden he felt less at home in America than in Florence or Vienna. Yet place mattered little to him. An artist and a creator, his kingdom was within. Of his environment he demanded only harmony and space. A bee buzzed into the open heart of a rose, bending it with his weight. A little breeze wafted its perfume toward him. His eyes wandered over the delicate, riotous color of the sweet-pea hedge and rested in content upon the mignonette border. A circular path of white gravel surrounded the grass plot about the dial. From it as a center curved paths wandered outward dividing the flower-beds. The flowers were planted without much regularity except for the borders of four o'clock and mignonette. It was this spot that had inspired Mark's song cycle, "The Sun-dial." A certain quality of youth and freshness as natural as a spring in the woods had won for it quick recognition. Mark's artistic tendency was not exotic. Although not retrogressive, he had drunk deep at the springs of Bach, Schubert, and Mozart, and the basis of his work was sound.