Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/178

 Margaret swung a chair around and sat down on it.

“Can’t you manage your dressings?” she asked, quietly. It was Jamie’s turn to be disconcerted.

“You know,” said Margaret, “when you bend over to reach the hose and going through the garden, the bandages across your back and the straps over your shoulders show, and they look to me to be cumbersome things. I’ve wanted to speak to you for a week. I believe I could take some unbleached muslin and make a kind of jacket and fold some supports across your shoulders that would hold it up exactly as well and not be half so uncomfortable.”

Jamie sat silently staring at her.

At last he said: “I think what I had in my mind was this: I was going to ask you, if you could stomach it, if you would take one good look at a decoration I wear on my left breast, and then I thought I’d go to work and put a kind of schedule that I’ve thought out for myself into practice for, say one month; and then I’d ask you if you would look again and see if I’d done any good. I’ve got a shrapnel wound and it must have been particularly filthy shrapnel. It carried with it some sort of damnable poison that defied the best doctors at the base hospitals and passed me on to London and then to this country and clear across the continent. I’ve had a year of boiling in hot water and fussing with nurses and doctors and I’m worse than I was when I began their treatment. Just as a little secret between you and me, I’ll tell you this. They were going to put me in a tuberculosis place when they knew and admitted I didn’t have tuberculosis yet,