His heart would break with love

The whole Scene:

THE BOY WAS NOT quite three; he could not have gone far. He couldn’t. So Jamie told him­self, try­ing to con­trol the pan­ic that was creep­ing into his mind as fast as the fog was cov­er­ing the ground.
“Stay here, and stay togeth­er!” he said to Iso­bel and Lady Dun­sany, both of whom blinked at him in sur­prise. “Call out for the lad, keep call­ing out—but din­na move a step. Here, hold the hors­es.” He thrust the bun­dled reins into Wilberforce’s hand, and the lawyer opened his mouth as though to protest, but Jamie didn’t stay to hear it.
“William!” he bel­lowed, plung­ing into the fog.
“Willie! Willie!” The women’s high­er voic­es oblig­ing­ly took up the call, reg­u­lar as a bell on a ship’s buoy, and serv­ing the same pur­pose. “Willie! Where are youuuu?”
The air had changed quite sud­den­ly, no longer clear but soft and echo­ing; sound seemed to come from every­where and nowhere.
“William!” The sound bounced off the stones and the short, leath­ery turf. “William!”
He was mov­ing up the slope, Jamie could tell that much. Per­haps William had gone to explore the shepherd’s hut. Wilber­force had joined the women now in call­ing out but was doing it in coun­ter­point, rather than in uni­son with them.
Jamie had the feel­ing that he could not breathe, that the fog was chok­ing him—but this was non­sense. Pure illusion.“William!”His shins thumped into the fall­en wall of the shepherd’s hut. He could not see more than the faintest out­line of the stones but felt his way inside and crawled quick­ly along the walls, call­ing out for the boy. Nothing.
Fogs might last an hour, or a day.
“Willie-iam-Wil-Willy-iam-WILLIE!”
Jamie grit­ted his teeth. If they didn’t keep qui­et now and then, he couldn’t hear Willie shout­ing back. If the boy was capa­ble of shout­ing. The foot­ing was treach­er­ous, the grass slip­pery, the ground rocky. And if he went all the way to the bot­tom of the slope, the moss …
He went high­er, among the tum­bled stones. Stag­gered from one to anoth­er, feel­ing round their bases, stub­bing his toes. The fog was cold in his chest, aching. His foot came down on some­thing soft—Willie’s jacket—and his heart leapt.“WILLIAM!”
Was that a sound, a whim­per? He stopped dead, try­ing to lis­ten, try­ing to hear through the whis­per of the mov­ing fog and the dis­tant voic­es, cacoph­o­nous as a ring of church bells.And then, quite sud­den­ly, he saw the boy curled up in a rocky hol­low, the yel­low of his shirt show­ing briefly through an eddy in the fog. He lunged and seized William before he could dis­ap­pear, clutched him to his bosom, say­ing, “It’s all right, a chuisle, it’s all right now, din­na be trou­bled, we’ll go and see your grannie, aye?”
“Mac! Mac, Mac! Oh, Mac!”
Willie clung to him like a leech, try­ing to bur­row into his chest, and he wrapped his arms tight around the boy, too over­come to speak.
To this point, he could not real­ly have said that he loved William. Feel the ter­ror of respon­si­bil­i­ty for him, yes. Car­ry thought of him like a gem in his pock­et, cer­tain­ly, reach­ing now and then to touch it, mar­veling. But now he felt the per­fec­tion of the tiny bones of William’s spine through his clothes, smooth as mar­bles under his fin­gers, smelled the scent of him, rich with the incense of inno­cence and the faint tang of shit and clean linen. And thought his heart would break with love.

All rights for the Pic­ture of Jamie go to the right­ful owner Starz/Sony
Quo­te and Excerpt by Diana Gabaldon from “The Scottish Prisoner”
I own not­hing but the editing