For three weeks the weather had been chilly and disagreeable. “The winter will set in early,” the oldest inhabitants were prophesying, when suddenly the full glory of the Indian summer burst upon the city.

Berty was delighted. “Dear Grandma will get better now,” she kept saying, hopefully. “This is what she wants—just a little warm sunshine before the winter comes.”

Grandma’s health had for some time been a cause of anxiety to her many friends. All through the autumn she had been ailing, and strangely quiet, even for her. And she had complained of feeling cold, a thing she had never done before in her life. Nothing seemed to warm her, not even the blazing fires that Berty kept in some of the many open fireplaces with which the old house was well supplied.

To-day there was a change. When the warm,[263] lovely sunshine came streaming into her room, Grandma had got out of bed. She had come down-stairs, and, very quietly, but with a gentle smile that sent Berty into an ecstasy of delight, she had visited every room in the house.

The guinea-pigs and pigeons in the wood-shed, the two women working in the kitchen, had been made glad by a call from her, and now she was resting on a sofa in the parlour.

“I feel twenty years younger to see you going about!” exclaimed Berty, delightedly, as she tucked a blanket round her.

“Twenty years!” murmured Grandma.

“Of course that’s exaggeration,” explained Berty, apologetically. “I know that you know I’m not twenty yet. I just wanted you to understand how glad I feel.”

“Go out on the veranda,” said Grandma, “and breathe the fresh air. You have been in the house too much with me lately.”

Berty’s upper lip was covered with a dew of perspiration. She was hot all the time, partly from excitement and anxiety about Grandma, and partly from her incessant activity in waiting on her in the heated atmosphere of the house.

Berty reluctantly made her way to the veranda,[264] where she promptly dislodged from a rocking-chair the mongrel pup, who, after long hesitation, had finally chosen to take up his abode with her.

The pup, however, crawled up beside her after she sat down, and she gently swayed to and fro in the rocking-chair, absently stroking his head and gazing out at the stripped grain-fields across the river.
“The ripened sheaves are garnered in,
Garnered in, garnered in,”

she was singing softly to herself, when some one remarked in an undertone, “Well, how goes it?”

“Oh,” she said, looking up, “it is you, is it, the omnipresent Tom?”

“Yes, I just slipped up for a minute to see how Grandma is. Won’t this sunshine set her up?”

“You saw her as you came through the room?”

“Yes, but she was asleep, so I did not speak. How is she?”

“Better, much better, and I am so glad.”

“So am I,” responded Tom, heartily; “it makes us all feel bad to have her ill, but, I say, Berty, you must not take it so to heart. You’re looking thin.”

“I can’t help worrying about Grandma, Tom.”

“How long since you’ve been out?”

[265]

“Two weeks.”

“That’s too long for one of your active disposition to stay in the house. Come, take your dog and walk back to town with me. See, he is all ready to come.”

Mugwump, indeed, was fawning round Tom in a servile manner.

“He’s liked me ever since he had a taste of my coat,” observed the young man.

“If you won’t take a walk with me, let me row you over to Bobbetty’s Island this afternoon,” pursued Tom.

Berty shook her head, but said, eagerly, “Do tell me how Mafferty is getting on.”

“Finely—he says that’s a first-class shanty we put up for him—the stove is a beauty, and, Berty, another consignment of cats has arrived.”

“Oh, Tom, what are they like?”

The young man launched into a description ............