Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/366

 understand, but I will not join you in the belief that there is anything unmanly attaching to Mr. MacFarlane. In the few days she was here before the child was born, Mrs. MacFarlane seemed to adore him. She had no unkind word to say against him.”

“What’s that?” asked the doctor, sharply.

“I am telling you the truth,” said the nurse. “She said that he was the noblest man, the finest man, in all the world. She said that he had done one thing so big and shining that no other man would have done it. She said that she had a feeling that she would not survive the birth of the baby. When she showed me her marriage certificate, I supposed she intended me to send for him. I looked up his residence. She said that if her baby should live, provisions had been made for it, but she expressed a wish to me that so fine a man as he might have it. I don’t know how to explain the fact that they haven’t been together these months, but I do know that the fault did not lie with Mr. MacFarlane.”

“In that case,” said the doctor to Jamie, “very likely I owe you an apology. I am seeing so much these days that is exactly as things should not be in this world, that I am getting fairly raw. I do apologize if I have said something I shouldn’t. About your son and provisions having been made for him, that’s up to you. If you want the child, of course, in the face of this marriage certificate, the law will give him to you.”

Jamie turned to the nurse.

“What did she say?” he asked.