Before her there were grouped ever so many children, twenty-five or thirty, perhaps.  The tots in the front rows were cosy and comfortable on piles of cushions, and the seven or eight year olds in the back row were in seats a little higher.  Each child had a sprig of lilac in its hand.  The young girl wore a soft white dress with lavender flowers scattered all over it, and a great bunch of the flowers in her belt.

She was a lovely creature!  At least, I believe she was.  I have an indistinct remembrance that her enemies (if she has any) might call her hair red; but I could n’t stop looking at her long enough at the time to decide precisely what color it was.  And I believe, now that several days have passed, that her nose turned up; but at the moment, whenever I tried to see just how much it wandered from the Grecian outline, her eyes dazzled me and I never found out.

As she seated herself in their midst, the children turned their faces expectantly toward her, like flowers toward the sun.

“You know it ’s the last Monday, dears,” she said; “and we ’ve had our good-by story.”

“Tell it again!  Sing it again!” came from two kilted adorers in the back row.

“Not to-day;” and she shook her head with a smile.  “You know we always stop within the hour, and that is the reason we are always eager to come again; but this sprig of lilac that you all hold in your hands has something to tell; not a long story, just a piece of one for another good-by.  I think when we go home, it we all press the flowers in heavy books, and open the books sometimes while we are away from each other this summer, that the sweet fragrance will come to us again, and the faded blossom will tell its own story to each one of us.  And this is the story,” she said, as she turned her spray of lilac in her fingers.

* * * * *

There was once a little lilac-bush that grew by a child’s window.  There was no garden there, only a tiny bit of ground with a few green things in it; and because there were no trees in the crowded streets, the birds perched on the lilac-bush to sing, and two of them even built a nest in it once, for want of something larger.

It had been a very busy lilac-bush all its life:  drinking up moisture from the earth and making it into sap; adding each year a tiny bit of wood to its slender trunk; filling out its leaf-buds; making its leaves larger and larger; and then—­oh, happy, happy time!—­hanging purple flowers here and there among its branches.

It always felt glad of its hard work when Hester came to gather some of its flowers just before Easter Sunday.  For one spray went to the table where Hester and her mother ate together; one to Hester’s teacher; one to the gray stone church around the corner, and one to a little lame girl who sat, and sat, quite still, day after day, by the window of the next house.