“’For love’s sweet sake, in my hour of need,
       Blossom and deck me, little seed.’

“Lo, as the words left her lips, the moon shone out from behind the clouds above the dark forest.  There was a fragrance of lilies all about her, and a gossamer gown floated around her, whiter than the whiteness of the fairest lily.  It was fine, like the finest lace that the frost-elves weave, and softer than the softest ermine of the snow.  On her long golden hair gleamed a coronet of pearls.

“So beautiful, so dazzling was she as she entered the castle door, that the prince came down to meet her, and kneeling, kissed her hand, and claimed her as his bride.  Then came the bishop in his mitre, and led her to the throne, and before them all the flax-spinner’s maiden was married to the prince, and made the Princess Olga.

“Then, until the seven days and seven nights were done, the revels lasted in the castle.  And in the merriment the old flax-spinner was again forgotten.  Her kindness of the past, her loneliness in the present, had no part in the thoughts of the Princess Olga.

“But the beads that had rolled away into the darkness buried themselves in the earth, and took root and sprang up.  There at the castle gate they bloomed, a strange, strange flower, for on every stem hung a row of little bleeding hearts.

“One day the Princess Olga, seeing them from her window, went down to them in wonderment.  ‘What do you here?’ she cried, for in her lonely forest life she had learned all speech of bird and beast and plant.

“‘We bloom for love’s sweet sake,’ they answered.  ’We have sprung from the old flax-spinner’s gift,—­the necklace thou didst break and scatter.  From her heart’s best blood she gave it, and her heart still bleeds to think she is forgotten.’

“Then they began to tell the story of the old dame’s sacrifices, all the seventy times seven that she had made for the sake of the maiden, and Olga grieved as she listened, that she could have been so ungrateful.  Then she brought the prince to listen to the story of the strange, strange flowers, and when he had heard, together they went to the lowly cottage and fetched the old flax-spinner to the castle, there to live out all her days.

“And still the flowers that we call bleeding hearts bloom on by cottage walls and castle gardens, reminding us how often ’tis through hearts that bleed for love’s sweet sake we reach our happiness.”

Betty came to the end of the story and paused, smiling, while the Little Colonel, who had listened with one arm around her mother’s neck, waited for what was to follow.

Mrs. Sherman took up a little box that had been lying in her lap under the sewing, and lifted something out of the jeweller’s cotton it contained.

“Elizabeth,” she asked, motioning the child toward her, “do you suppose the Princess Olga’s necklace was anything like this?” What she held up was a string of little gold beads.