and Bob shook their heads. Then they all hurried back to
Pansy's room, and nurse, bidding the children stand back, peered out of
the window. There was a tiny strip of ground railed in between the house
and the street. Nurse drew her head in again.

"Master Bob," she said, "run down and ask cook to let you out by the
back-door. I think I see the poor flower down there. It must have fallen
over."

Yes, _knocked_ over by a stray cat, most likely. The children had never
thought of cats. There it lay! Bob and the cook did their best, but
there was little to do. It was a poor little clump of green
"leaf-leaves" only that remained, when the sad procession from the
nursery tapped at their mother's door, Pansy's face so disfigured by
crying that you would _scarcely_ have known her.

Mamma was very sorry for her, very, _very_ sorry. She knew that to Pansy
it was a real big sorrow, trifling as some people might think it. But,
still, as she told the little girl, sorrows and troubles _have_ to come,
and till we learn to bear them and find the sweet in the bitter we are
not good for much. So she encouraged Pansy to be brave and unselfish and
not to make the nursery life sad and miserable on account of this
misfortune. And Pansy did her best. Only she begged her mother to take
the flower-pot away.

"I think I would like it to be buried," she said with a sob. "It's like
when Bob's canary died."

But two or three days after that, it may have been a week even, one
morning mamma came into the nursery looking very happy and carrying
something in her hand over which she had thrown a handkerchief.

"Pansy dear," she said, "I waited to tell you till I was quite sure. I
did not 'bury' your pansy root, and I have been watching it. And do you
know there is another bud just about to burst, and a still tinier one,
all green as yet, but which will come on in time. In a week or two you
will have two new flowers quite as pretty, I hope, as the other ones."

"Oh mamma," said Pansy, clasping her hands together. Her heart was too
full to say more.

And the buds did blossom into lovely flowers, even lovelier, the
children thought, than the first ones. For there was the intense delight
of watching them growing day by day, the gardener's delight which no one
can really understand who has not felt it.

No accident happened this time, and when the season was over, the pansy
root was planted in a corner of the little strip of flower border at the