ught.

Lucy, coming down later, stepped to the door for a moment to breathe in
the sunshine and sweet morning air. "Oh," she cried, and her voice rang
out sharply, full of dismay, "Oh, Mona, come quick. Whatever has happened
to our wallflowers! Why, look at them! They are all dead! Oh, the poor
things! Someone must have pulled them up in sheer wickedness! Isn't it
cruel? Isn't it shameful!"

Mona, rushing to the door to look, found Lucy on her knees by the dying
plants, the tears dropping from her eyes. Only yesterday they were so
happy and so beautiful, a rich carpet of brown, gold, tawny, and crimson,
all glowing in the sunshine, and filling the air with their glorious
scent--and now! Oh, it was pitiful, pitiful.

"I'll fill a tub with water and plunge them all in," cried Lucy,
frantically collecting her poor favourites--then suddenly she dropped
them. "No, no, I won't, I'll bury them out of sight. I could never give
them new life. Oh, who could have been so wicked?"

Mona was standing beside her, white-faced and silent. At her mother's
last question, she opened her lips for the first time. "I--I did it,"
she gasped in a horrified voice. "I--didn't know, I must have done it
when I was weeding. Oh, mother, I am so sorry. What can I do--oh,
what can I do!"

"You! Oh, Mona!" But at the sight of Mona's distress Lucy forgot her
own.

"Never mind. It can't be helped. 'Twas an accident, of course, and no
one can prevent accidents. Don't fret about it, dear. Of course,
you wouldn't have hurt them if you'd known what you were doing!"

But her words failed to comfort Mona, for in her inmost heart she knew
that she should have known better, that she could have helped it.
It was just carelessness again.

"They wouldn't have lasted more than a week or two longer, I expect,"
added Lucy, consolingly, trying to comfort herself as well as Mona.
"Now, we'll get this bed ready for the ten-weeks stocks. It will do the
ground good to rest a bit. I daresay the stocks will be all the finer for
it later on." But still Mona was not consoled.

"If I hadn't run away and left them to go and buy that hateful wreath,"
she was thinking. "If only I had remembered to press the earth tight
round them again--if--if only I'd been more careful when I was weeding,
and--if, if, if! It's all ifs with me!" Aloud, she said bitterly,
"I only seem to do harm to everything I touch. I'd better give up!
If I don't do anyth