Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/345

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THE HOME-MADE MIRACLE
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cately coloured with it. Somewhere very close a mocking bird was singing and white gulls were passing in homeward flight, and a few little sandpipers were quarrelling down on the shore line. There was a whole world of things for Jamie to see and to love and to thank God for, but what he did see was the fact that the Storm Woman had sat in her place and arranged the flowers that she had brought him. Tiny withered leaves of sand verbena lay on the rocks at his feet, discarded blooms that were too old had been dropped there. Jamie took one step farther and looked, and in his place there lay on the rocks three exquisite heads of bloom, a long trailing stem and a medium and a shorter stem twined together deftly, braided past the leaves and laid in the place upon which he had sat as one would lay an exquisite tribute on the grave of the dead. That very thought came to Jamie.

“Good Lord!” he said, “I wonder what she’d think if she knew I am about ten times the man that I was the day I married her! I wonder if she’d think I haven’t played fair if she knew that I was working with all my might to be a whole man. And I wonder what she’d think if she knew that I’m not keeping my promise not to try to find her. I wonder what she’d think if she knew I broke it when I went to Margaret Cameron to see if she could tell me anything, and I broke it again when I went along the beach trailing a footstep that I know. I wonder what she’d think if she knew that right down in the depths of my heart I just about adore her. I wonder what she’d think if she knew that there haven’t been very many minutes