"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 hard for five minutes, and then stopped and congratulated herself that the hour must be nearly over. "But I must play over Gran'ma's little tune," she said to herself. "Gran'ma's so fond of it, and it is pretty, only I don't like his being killed. Malbrook was killed, I know he was. Gran'ma told me so." She got out an old music-book of Madam's young days, and turned to a page on which were a number of small tunes of a few bars each, and each marked with a name. She began to play the old air of Malbrook, very sweetly and plaintively, so as quite to justify Miss Goodchild's opinion that she had a taste for music. But at the last bar Terry's little hands fell limp, and she burst out crying.