Bob was quite sure it had, certainly the crumply look on the purple petal was no worse, so the plan was kept to, and every night the pot was carefully settled on the ledge.
I think it was on the third morning that the dreadful thing happened which I must now tell you of.
When Pansy opened the window to draw in her dear flower and bid it good morning, there was no pansy, no flower-pot, nothing to be seen!
With a sort of shriek Pansy flew across the day nursery to the bedroom where nurse was dressing baby Charley, while Bob, all ready, was giving the last touch up to his curly hair.
"Nurse, Bob," she cried, "have you possibly brought the pansy in while I was asleep?"
But nurse 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.