that stirred so many
hearts with longing, eddied carelessly into the garden of the big
brick house with the plain verandas, doubling round to the garden
at the back, where, in an old-fashioned rocking chair with chintz
cushions, sat the ex-Premier.

The wind, still charged with wild roses, stirred the lilac trees and
mountain ash, and circled noiselessly around the chair where he sat,
and played queer tricks with his memory, for all of us are young in
June, when the pageant of summer is passing by.

"I like to see you knitting, Jessie," he said gently "it is a peaceful
art, untouched by worldly cares. I wish I could hear hens cackling,
and the drowsy sounds of a farmyard, all set in nature's honest key.
I'm tired of people and machinery and telephones and committees, and
all these other inventions of the devil."

Rosie, scrubbing the veranda, hearing the last part of the sentence,
piously thanked God for the master's returning health of body and
mind, and flattened her head against the veranda post, to catch more.

"The things I have given my life to," he said sadly, "have fallen away
from me--I built on a foundation of sand, and when the rains descended
and the floods came, my house fell and left me by the ruins, groping
in the ashes."

"It isn't so bad as that, James," his wife said timidly. "You are a
respected man still, you know you are--you have plenty of friends, if
you would only let them come. It's no disgrace for a public man to be
defeated."

"It's not that, Jessie," he said. "It doesn't matter to me now what
the world thinks, it can't think any worse of me than I think of it.
No, the bitterest part of all this to me is that I have none of my
own. I want some one of my own. I was too harsh--too hasty."

"If Jim had lived," she began, wistfully--

The front veranda bell pealed loudly, and Rosie hastily wiped her
hands on her petticoat, and went to answer it, sorry to miss any part
of the conversation.

"I won't see any one," said the ex-Premier, again. "She knows--I
won't. Go and tell her I won't."

When Rosie opened the door, a card was put in her hand, and the
visitor, a young lady, asked her if she would be good enough to give
it to the ex-Premier.

"He won't see you," said Rosie quickly. "He won't see any one. I am
turning them away by the dozens."

The visitor took the card from Rosie's hand, and hastily wrote a few
words on it. Rosie told the cook about it afterwards.

"She had eyes lik