Jamie had thought that he was fortified for this very thing, but when it happened he learned that he had not been prepared in the least. He felt precisely as if someone had slugged him over the head with a very substantial piece of extremely hard wood. He had only brains enough left for an observation that he was too polite to make at hazard, so he said to himself: “Well, it may be that this house looks exactly like ‘Papa,’ but God knows that you don’t!” He went further: “And I’d always been taught that there was a strong probability that girls would resemble their fathers.”
What Jamie did outwardly was to get his heels together, square his shoulders, and manage a bow.
“Am I to understand,” he asked, “that you are a daughter of the Bee Master?”
The young lady looked at Jamie and smiled, probably the most attractive smile she could muster.
“I am not only a daughter,” she said, “but I am his whole family. Of course, when the news came of Papa’s having died so suddenly and unexpectedly, it was necessary for me to spend some time seeing that he was laid away as he would have desired to be and doing everything that I could to comfort Mamma.”
Jamie suddenly found himself putting up what he considered a fight.
“I had understood from the Bee Master,” he said, “that both his wife and daughter were dead.”
“I don’t know much about his first marriage. Of course, his first wife was dead before he married Mamma,
