Now
Loretta turned scarlet as the step-mother spoke severely:
"You hush, Bub," and Bub rose and stalked into the house. Aunt
Tilly was leaning back in her chair--gasping--and consternation
smote the group. June rose suddenly with her string of dangling
beans.
"I haven't shown you my room, Loretty. Don't you want to see it?
Come on, all of you," she added to the girls, and they and Loretta
with one swift look of gratitude rose shyly and trooped shyly
within where they looked in wide-mouthed wonder at the marvellous
things that room contained. The older women followed to share
sight of the miracle, and all stood looking from one thing to
another, some with their hands behind them as though to thwart the
temptation to touch, and all saying merely:
"My! My!"
None of them had ever seen a piano before and June must play the
"shiny contraption" and sing a song. It was only curiosity and
astonishment that she evoked when her swift fingers began running
over the keys from one end of the board to the other, astonishment
at the gymnastic quality of the performance, and only astonishment
when her lovely voice set the very walls of the little room to
vibrating with a dramatic love song that was about as intelligible
to them as a problem in calculus, and June flushed and then smiled
with quick understanding at the dry comment that rose from Aunt
Tilly behind:
"She shorely can holler some!"
She couldn't play "Sourwood Mountain" on the piano--nor "Jinny git
Aroun'," nor "Soapsuds over the Fence," but with a sudden
inspiration she went back to an old hymn that they all knew, and
at the end she won the tribute of an awed silence that made them
file back to the beans on the porch.
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