e difference between a
weed and a flower?'

'I should think you were old enough to know.'

'I know them by sight--sometimes. But what is the _difference?_'

'Your eyes tell you, do they not?'

'No, papa. They tell me, sometimes, which is which; but I mean, why
isn't a flower a weed? I asked Christopher, but he couldn't tell me.'

'I do not understand the question. It seems to me you are talking
nonsense.'

The colonel raised his book again, and Esther took the hint, and went
back to the table with her flowers. She sat down and looked at them.
Fair they were, and fresh, and pure; and they bore spring's messages,
to all that could hear the message. If Esther could, it was in a
half-unconscious way, that somehow awakened by degrees almost as much
pain as pleasure. Or else, it was simply that the glow and stir of her
walk was fading away, and allowing the old wonted train of thought to
come in again. The bright expression passed from her face; the features
settled into a melancholy dulness, most unfit for a child and painful
to see; there was a droop of the corners of the mouth, and a lax fall
of the eyelids, and a settled gloom in the face, that covered it and
changed it like a mask. The very features seemed to grow heavy, in the
utter heaviness of the spirit.

She sat so for a while, musing, no longer busy with such pleasant
things as flowers and weeds; then roused herself. The weariness of
inaction was becoming intolerable. She went to a corner of the room,
where a large mahogany box was half-concealed beneath a table covered
with a cloth; with a good deal of effort she lugged the box forth. It
was locked, and she went to the sofa.

'Papa, may I look at the casts?'

'Yes.'

'You have got the key, papa.'

The key was fished out of the colonel's waistcoat pocket, and Esther
sat down on the floor and unlocked the box. It was filled with casts in
plaster of Paris, of old medals and bas-reliefs; and it had long been a
great amusement of Esther's to take them all out and look at them, and
then carefully pack them all away again between their layers of soft
paper and cotton batting. In the nature of the case, this was an
amusement that would pall if too often repeated; so it rarely happened
that Esther got them out more than three or four times a year. This
time she had hardly begun to take them out and place them carefully on
the table, when Mrs. Barker came in to lay the cloth for dinner. Esther
must put the ca