Mollie closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. She missed her morning walk and the fresh air of out-of-doors, so she gave it up, opened her eyes again, and lay wakefully thinking of home and Mother, Dick and Jean, and school. The big clock on the mantelpiece seemed to go very, very slowly, its tick loud and deliberate, as though it would say: "Don't think you are going to get off one single minute--sixty minutes to the hour you have to live through, and there are still two hours till tea-time." The rain splashed against the window, the wind moaned through the tree-tops, and the room got steadily darker. "Oh dear!" Mollie whispered to herself, "what _can_ I do to make the time pass?" She sat up and looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums--the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with long ribbons floating over one shoulder. Her legs were very conspicuous in white stockings and funny boots with tassels dangling on their fronts. "I expect this is how Ellen Montgomery looked in _The Wide, Wide World_," Mollie said to herself. "She would be rather pretty if she were properly dressed; she looks about my age. I wonder what sort of time she had--horribly dull, probably. No hockey, no Guiding, no fox-trots--I expect she danced the polka, and recited 'Lives of great men all remind us', and got pi-jawed ten times a day. I can't imagine how children endured life in those days. Thank goodness I wasn't born till 1907! She does look rather nice, though--and oh! I wish you could talk, my dear! I _am_ dull." Just then Aunt Mary began to play the piano in the next room. She played soft, old-fashioned tunes, so that her niece might be soothed to sleep. Mollie did not recognize the tunes but she liked them; they seemed to sympathize with her as she continued to look at the prim little girl in the photograph. "Perhaps she played those very tunes; she looks as if she practised for one hour a day _regularly_." As Mollie lay there, the sweet old music sounding in her ears and her eyes steadily fixed on the face of that other child of long ago, it seemed to her that the child smiled at her.