"Here are some stamps and two balloons for Jim. I do hope you will come—. Lovingly, Pearl."
* * * * *
The winds of June, which whipped the dust of Water Street into miniature whirlwinds under the noses of the horses, were heavy with the unmistakable perfume of wild roses. The delivery man, sniffing the air, decided he would go that night to the Beach, just to see the fields of roses; the streetcar-conductor went suddenly homesick for a sight of the poplar trees, with the roses on the headlands, and the plushy touch of green grass under his feet, and the wizened little Scotch milliner across the road took what she called a "scunner" at the silk and muslin flowers, with their odious starchy, stuffy smell, and wondered where the farmer was, who two years ago had asked her to marry him. The wind—heavy with the perfume 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—