Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/172

 It is quite impossible that I should voice adequate thanks for what you did for me, and now I find that it is equally impossible to write anything on this paper that will come any nearer expressing my sincere thanks for the obligation to you under which I find myself. With all my heart I do thank you, and I hope that God will bless you and keep you. I hope that you may be mistaken and that there may be a long and happy life in store for you.

Half-a-dozen lines ahead of it, Jamie got it, and it hit him in the face like a blow. It was written there in a firm, beautifully legible hand, just such writing as Jamie had imagined the hand that he had held last night and had seen in operation that afternoon, would write:

With undying obligations, .

“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Jamie. “Can you beat it? Is she really going to take my name? Is she really going to use it in some kind of business? Is she really going to bring a child into the world and call it ‘MacFarlane’?”

Then Jamie began the process of reading the letter again, and it was not long until he could have repeated it a word at a time backward. Just why he kept getting it out and holding it in his fingers and turning it over and examining the paper and studying the script, he did not know. It was wonderful, it was right, it was all his heart could have asked. It sounded exactly like the girl who was just the height, who had the strength of body, who