“She wears now a black dress.”
“Her eyes are full of sorrow,” they said.
“The Signorina tells us that, now, she has no madre.”
Andrea, apart from the others, listened, sympathetic, wondering. Sorrow should be replaced by happiness, of this he was quite sure. Was not the most unhappy child in the Children’s House the one most loved, most helped by his Signorina? Had he anything to offer this friend that would give her joy? He ran to her, grasped her hand in his; dragged her from her chair, across the threshold, into a luring little green path dented with many child footprints.
“See!” he exclaimed. “I waited.”
Where Andrea had laid away his hope, a tall, straight stalk of heavily odorous lily bloom pointed skyward. The earth that it had scattered in its bulb-bursting still surrounded the strong, green stalk. It was a chalice of the spring, a symbol of life that is eternal.
“I planted it and I waited,” Andrea repeated. “All the children waited with me.
“It blooms,” he finished, laughing up into the joyful eyes that smiled back, comforted, into his.
Life is a phenomenon in which no force is wasted and out of whose apparent death there continually confronts us the wonder of new life. Some of us are blind to the lessons Nature teaches, but little children may be led to feel nature facts that spell for them faith and hope and sympathy for all time.