For a time I just walked around the different rooms downstairs, looking at the chairs and tables and rugs all just so, as if they ’d been measured with a yardstick.  Marie jerked up a shade and pushed a chair crooked and kicked a rug up at one corner; but Mary put them all back properly—­so there wasn’t any fun in that for long.

After a while I opened the parlor door and peeked in.  They used to keep it open when Mother was here; but Aunt Jane doesn’t use it.  I knew where the electric push button was, though, and I turned on the light.

It used to be an awful room, and it’s worse now, on account of its shut-up look.  Before I got the light on, the chairs and sofas loomed up like ghosts in their linen covers.  And when the light did come on, I saw that all the old shiver places were there.  Not one was missing.  Great-Grandfather Anderson’s coffin plate on black velvet, the wax cross and flowers that had been used at three Anderson funerals, the hair wreath made of all the hair of seventeen dead Andersons and five live ones—­no, no, I don’t mean all the hair, but hair from all seventeen and five.  Nurse Sarah used to tell me about it.

Well, as I said, all the shiver places were there, and I shivered again as I looked at them; then I crossed over to Mother’s old piano, opened it, and touched the keys.  I love to play.  There wasn’t any music there, but I don’t need music for lots of my pieces.  I know them by heart—­only they’re all gay and lively, and twinkly-toe dancy. Marie music.  I don’t know a one that would be proper for Mary to play.

But I was just tingling to play something, and I remembered that Father was in the observatory, and Aunt Jane upstairs in the other part of the house where she couldn’t possibly hear.  So I began to play.  I played the very slowest piece I had, and I played softly at first; but I know I forgot, and I know I hadn’t played two pieces before I was having the best time ever, and making all the noise I wanted to.

Then all of a sudden I had a funny feeling as if somebody somewhere was watching me; but I just couldn’t turn around.  I stopped playing, though, at the end of that piece, and then I looked; but there wasn’t anybody in sight.  But the wax cross was there, and the coffin plate, and that awful hair wreath; and suddenly I felt as if that room was just full of folks with great staring eyes.  I fairly shook with shivers then, but I managed to shut the piano and get over to the door where the light was.  Then, a minute later, out in the big silent hall, I crept on tiptoe toward the stairs.  I knew then, all of a sudden, why I’d felt somebody was listening.  There was.  Across the hall in the library in the big chair before the fire sat—­Father!  And for ’most a whole half-hour I had been banging away at that piano on marches and dance music!  My!  But I held my breath and stopped short, I can tell you.  But he didn’t move nor turn, and a minute later I was safely by the door and halfway up the stairs.