his consciousness in a different way from any other woman.
“Because before the Lord and by the law, she is my wife,” said Jamie, “and I cannot get away from that fact, and she cannot get away from it. She cannot marry any other man without making herself known and divorcing me.”
Then Jamie got another blow that knocked him speechless and almost senseless for a moment.
“What’s more,” he said to himself and to all and sundry when he gained sufficient breath with which to speak, “what’s more, James Lewis MacFarlane, you can’t marry any woman, you can’t have a real home, you can’t have a hearthstone so long as you are legally married to a girl who wants only your name, or to one who doesn’t want you in person at all!”
Jamie sat down suddenly and admitted that he was possessed of a single-track mind. He had been on the track that led to death and elimination when he had done this fool marrying stunt. Now he was on the track that led to a home, to work in the world, to the things that all men desire when they are sane and healthful, and he was bound as tight as the law could bind him by records in the office of the Marriage License Bureau of the county in which he lived. That was something more to think about. So Jamie went about being the Keeper of the Bees, the master of the house, the partner of the little Scout with several problems very persistently in the forefront of his mind.
