after, Gerda played with the flowers in the warm sunshine. She
knew every flower, and yet, although there were so many of them, it
seemed as if one were missing, but which it was she could not tell.
One day, however, as she sat looking at the old woman's hat with the
painted flowers on it, she saw that the prettiest of them all was a
rose. The old woman had forgotten to take it from her hat when she
made all the roses sink into the earth. But it is difficult to keep
the thoughts together in everything; one little mistake upsets all our
arrangements.

"What, are there no roses here?" cried Gerda; and she ran out into
the garden, and examined all the beds, and searched and searched.
There was not one to be found. Then she sat down and wept, and her
tears fell just on the place where one of the rose-trees had sunk
down. The warm tears moistened the earth, and the rose-tree sprouted
up at once, as blooming as when it had sunk; and Gerda embraced it and
kissed the roses, and thought of the beautiful roses at home, and,
with them, of little Kay.

"Oh, how I have been detained!" said the little maiden, "I
wanted to seek for little Kay. Do you know where he is?" she asked the
roses; "do you think he is dead?"

And the roses answered, "No, he is not dead. We have been in the
ground where all the dead lie; but Kay is not there."

"Thank you," said little Gerda, and then she went to the other
flowers, and looked into their little cups, and asked, "Do you know
where little Kay is?" But each flower, as it stood in the sunshine,
dreamed only of its own little fairy tale of history. Not one knew
anything of Kay. Gerda heard many stories from the flowers, as she
asked them one after another about him.

And what, said the tiger-lily? "Hark, do you hear the drum?--'turn,
turn,'--there are only two notes, always, 'turn, turn.' Listen
to the women's song of mourning! Hear the cry of the priest! In
her long red robe stands the Hindoo widow by the funeral pile. The
flames rise around her as she places herself on the dead body of her
husband; but the Hindoo woman is thinking of the living one in that
circle; of him, her son, who lighted those flames. Those shining
eyes trouble her heart more painfully than the flames which will
soon consume her body to ashes. Can the fire of the heart be
extinguished in the flames of the funeral pile?"

"I don't understand that at all," said little Gerda.

"That is my story," said the tiger-lily.