sing;" and this time Terry ran the five-finger exercise up
and down two or three times without stopping before she let her hands drop
again from the keys.

Suddenly a bright idea struck her.

"I wonder what o'clock it is!" she said to herself. "I must have been at
least half an hour in this room."

She got down from the high stool and walked slowly across the long room,
feeling that she was getting rid of a little time by restraining her usual
rapid movements. Arriving at the door she stood with her back to it for a
few moments, gazing all around.

"Could it ever have been a real everyday place to live in, like Granny's
sitting-room upstairs, or the day nursery? Granny says it was a lovely,
comfortable room when she was going about, and everybody was in it every
day. And certainly there are a lot of nice things in it, if they were only
shaken about. But there's nobody to shake them, and it's awfully ghosty,
and I do so feel afraid the ghosts will hear my bad playing and come to me.
Now, I'm sure it must be half an hour, and I may go and look at the clock!"

She slipped out of the door and closed it behind her quickly, as if she
feared invisible hands might catch her unawares to keep her within. Up two
flights of stairs she went, and looked at the clock on the landing.

"Only ten minutes past twelve!" she exclaimed in dismay. "Oh, that dreadful
old clock must have stopped herself on purpose! Now, I will just watch to
see. I don't believe she's moving at all." And Terry put her back against
the wall and fixed her eyes on her enemy.

"No; she's going," said Terry, as the minute-hand made a slight onward
jerk, "but she has gone slow just the very morning I have got to practise."

She went down to the hall, slowly, counting the steps, and stood in the
hall looking at everything as if she had never been there before.

"I wonder if I might curl in behind that door with a story-book," she
thought, "or even with nothing at all; where I could hear the sounds of the
other parts of the house! But no, I couldn't. I know it would be wrong,
because I've got to be a whole hour at my practising. And I don't want to
have two wrongnesses in one day, bad as I am."

She returned at once to the drawing-room, and, seating herself again at the
piano, went steadily up and down a whole scale, trying seriously to turn in
her thumbs at the right places and to put her fingers where they ought to
be when she wanted them. She really worked h