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The Keeper of the Bees

Jamie gripped her hands.

“Go on and cry! Cry your heart out about it!” he said. “Put your head over here on my shoulder and let me hold you tight. If it tears you to pieces, you had better cry than to sit dry eyed like that.”

Margaret Cameron shook her head.

“I think I am cut too deep for tears,” she said. “I am just about killed. I wish to God I had something to do besides the routine of the house, something different, somebody who needed me! I wanted Molly to come home with me, but she seemed to have things keeping her in town, and she wanted me to come with her, and awful as it seems here now that Lolly is never going to come again, I don’t seem to be able even to think about leaving. I am hit pretty hard, losing my neighbour and all the light of love and laughter that there was in my life and in my home. I don’t mind telling you, Jamie, that the Bee Master did not care anything about me. His heart had been broken on the question of women.

“I don’t know all the details, but I know this much. He had had a first wife that he idolized, and after her death he had let another woman fool him into the idea that she would take care of his child and make a home for him and comfort him. But she wasn’t the right kind of a woman and she had a child of her own, and there was a tragedy about the Bee Master’s little girl. I don’t think he could prove it, but I think he knew in his heart that the other child had pushed her, and when they got to her, her spine was injured and she never could walk again. Her agony