Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/375

 the little Scout began to think aloud. “My! ain’t we accumulatin’! Talk about compound interest! I’ll say things are compoundin’ for this partnership! Here all unbeknownst to ourselves we get a house and flowers and trees and bees and now, by gracious! we get a baby! And, of course, if we got it and it’s yours, we got to take care of it. Say, where’s his mother?”

Jamie hesitated a second and decided that the truth was the quickest and the easiest.

“I hate to tell you, Buddy,” he said. “I hate to tell you, but the truth is this baby hasn’t any mother. The task of getting him into the world was too big for her. She paid for his life with hers. You will be glad to know that she was like your Aunt Beth. She went over to see what Heaven had in store for her laughing, laughing out loud, laughing the gayest laugh of contentment and exultation.”

From the floor the little Scout stared up at Jamie with wide eyes and slowly nodded a corroborative head. “I know, that was Aunt Beth’s smile come true. It’s the kind of a laugh that the smile she had would have been if it had broken through and come out loud. I told you being dead was beautiful, but I don’t see what’s going to become of this little new Jamie. You never saw the amount of oiling and bathing and bandaging and changing and dressing and weighing, you never saw anything to equal the things Mother does to our Jimmy.”

Then suddenly the little Scout came up to one knee and then the other, and then slowly assumed an erect position,