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 slipped on the mountains, and I can’t understand that. She was sure-footed as a goat. She’d been in the mountains all her life. Oh, Jamie, it’s all so useless. What am I going to do?”

Jamie hesitated.

“Margaret,” he said, “I came over here to tell you a tale of woe, but what I have to say seems feeble compared to what you are enduring.”

Margaret Cameron straightened in her chair. She drew her hands from Jamie’s and laid one of them on his head.

“Oh, my boy, my poor boy!” she cried. “Has that awful thing gone and broken open again? Have we got it all to do over?”

“No! No!” Jamie hastened to assure her. “No, it isn’t that. My side’s fine. I’m fairly sure I won’t have to wear either the pads or bandages more than two or three months more. I haven’t been able to stick to diet so well since you’ve been gone because I’m not much of cook and I haven’t been places where I could get what I needed.”

Margaret Cameron went on smoothing his hair.

“I guess you’re about all that’s left to me, Jamie,” she said. “I guess you are my job. It’s fair hell to stay at home, and it’s blacker hell to try to leave it. I doubt if I can go to Molly. If she wants to be with me, I guess she will have to come here. And as for you, lad, if it isn’t your side, what is it that’s hurting you?”

With Scot brevity Jamie told her.

“About the time I came here I married a girl. A few