ng something about the feud, as June came
around the corner, her quick eye had seen Loretta bend her head swiftly
over her work to hide the flush of her face. 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. Loretta lingered a moment and when June closed the piano and
the two girls went into the main room, a tall figure, entering, stopped
in the door and stared at June without speaking:

"Why, howdye, Uncle Rufe," said Loretta. "This is June. You didn't know
her, did ye?" The man laughed. Something in June's bearing made him take
off his hat; he came forward to shake hands, and June looked up into a
pair of bold black eyes that stirred within her again the vague fears of
her childhood. She had been afraid of him when she was a child, and it
was the old fear aroused that made her recall him by his