er all the
trouble I took!"

"The trouble you took was all boldness and disobedience," said Nancy, "and
it's just the way you're to be punished by not letting her know. It isn't
to screen you that I'm not tellin' her the whole of your conduct, but only
just that I won't have her sick about it. It wasn't you at all that got the
eggs, but Misther Reilly; for there you were stuck in the dyke, with the
pony hurted, an you as far off as to-morrow from Connolly's farm."

"It's a worse punishment than if you beat me," said Terry. "And you said I
had an appetite like a trooper, and I haven't, for I can't eat a bit."

"You're a jolly goose, then!" said Turly. "Breakfast's awfully good, I can
tell you."

"If you don't eat, it doesn't matter," said Nurse. "It'll maybe make you
think again before you set off to run into such dangers. If your head had
come against a stone when the pony went down--"

"But it didn't," said Terry. "It wasn't the least bit like that. I just
came sitting on the grass quite comfortably. And I tried to get to
Connolly's, and I didn't want Jocko to be hurt."

"It isn't the least use talking to you," said Nancy; "but I've another
punishment for you. I've been talking to Madam about your practising, and
you've got to begin to it. I told her you'd be forgettin' all your music,
and she said you'd betther go to it afther breakfast this very mornin'."

Now if there was one thing in the world that Terry hated it was her
"practising". To sit hammering out five-finger exercises on a piano in a
lonely room, making a dreary, monotonous noise, trying to turn in her
fingers and thumbs at the right places, and doing the same thing over and
over again, while the hands of the clock crept slowly round; all this meant
a penance which was torture to the active little creature.

However, Terry accepted her sentence in silence. She never thought of
disobeying a direct command like this; for it was true, as she had often
said, that she never did a thing which she believed at the time to be
wrong. It would be clearly wrong to refuse to do her practising when Nurse
and Gran'ma had decreed that it was to be done, and so she recognized that
the hated ordeal must be faced.

She got out her "music", sheets covered with wicked-looking black notes,
having figures and crosses marked above them in pencil to show her where
to put her little fingers, which were always sure to get themselves in the
wrong places. Before descending to