She was a lady in waiting.”

“What about the flowers in the botanical garden; are they allowed to attend the ball too? And how do they get out there? It is a very long way from where they live to the castle.”

“Oh sure, they can come!” exclaimed the student. “When flowers want to, they can fly. You have seen butterflies. Don’t they look like yellow, red, and white flowers? That is exactly what they were once. They are flowers who have jumped off their stems and have learned to fly with their petals; and when they first get a taste for it, they never return to their stems, and their little petals become real wings.

“There’s no way of knowing whether the flowers from the botanical garden know about what goes on in the castle. The next time you are there, you can whisper to one of the flowers that there will be a grand ball that night in the castle, and see what happens. Flowers can’t keep a secret, so that flower will tell it to the others; and when night comes, they will all fly to the castle. That will certainly surprise the professor who is in charge of the garden. The next day when he takes his morning walk, there won’t be a single flower left in the whole botanical garden; and I am sure he will write a paper about it.”

“But how will the flower I tell it to talk to the others? I am sure that I have never seen a flower speak,” said little Ida.

“They mime. It’s a regular pantomime. You have seen how, when the wind blows, all the flowers shake their heads and rustle their leaves; what they are saying to each other is just as plain as what we say with our tongues is to us.”

“Does the professor understand what they are saying?” asked little Ida.

“Sure he does. One morning when he came into the garden he saw a large nettle rustle its leaves at a carnation. It was saying, ‘You are so beautiful that I love you.’ But that kind of talk the professor doesn’t like, so he hit the nettle across the fingers—that is, its leaves. But the nettle burned him, and since then the professor has never dared touch a nettle.”

“That is very funny!” little Ida laughed.

“I don’t think that it’s the least bit funny,” said the old chancellor, who had just come into the room and had overheard the last part of the conversation; but he never found anything funny. “Such fantastic ideas are nonsense; they are harmful to a child and boring for grownups.”

The old chancellor did not like the student, especially when he found him cutting pictures out of paper with a pair of scissors. The student had just finished cutting a hanged man holding a heart; he’d been condemned for stealing hearts. Now the young man had started on another. It was the picture of a witch who was riding on a broom and was carrying her husband on the end of her nose.

Little Ida thought that everything the student did was amusing; and she thought a great deal about what he had said about her flowers. “My flowers are tired from dancing,” she thought, and carried her bouquet over to the little table on which her playthings were. She had a whole drawer full of toys too, and even a doll that lay in its own bed.

The doll’s name was Sophie. Little Ida picked her up and explained, “Please, be a good doll and sleep in the drawer tonight. The flowers are sick and have to sleep in your bed, so they can get well.”

The doll didn’t answer; she was angry because someone else was to sleep in her bed.

Little Ida put the flowers in the bed and pulled the covers up around them. She promised them that if they would be good and lie still she would make them a cup of tea. “You will be well enough to be up and around tomorow morning,” she added. Then she drew the curtains around the bed so the sun wouldn’t shine in their eyes.

All that evening she could not think about anything but what the student had told her. When her bedtime came, she ran over to the window and pulled aside the drapes to look at her mother’s plants, which were sitting in flowerpots on the window sill. She whispered to both the tulips and the hyacinths, “I know where you are going tonight.” The flowers acted as though they hadn’t heard her. They moved neither a petal nor a leaf; but little Ida believed what she had been told.

When she got into bed, little Ida lay awake thinking about how beautiful it must have been when all the flowers danced in the royal castle. “I wonder if my flowers have really been there,” she muttered; and then she fell asleep.

Late at night she woke; she had dreamed about the flowers and the student, who the chancellor had said was filling her head with nonsense. It was very quiet in the bedroom.