“Oh, yes,” Caroline nodded hastily.
She wanted to get to the piano quickly, before Cousin Penelope interfered. For she felt that Cousin Penelope was sitting up very straight and about to speak.
“Run along!” said Aunt Eunice. Did she, too, feel that Penelope was rising to remark?
Caroline “ran along.” She went so fast that she was almost out of earshot when Penelope expressed herself:
“Mother! That child—strumming on my piano!”
“She won’t hurt the piano fatally, my dear,” said Aunt Eunice, placidly but with unexpected firmness. “Poor little shy thing! She’s lonely and homesick, as any one can see, and if the piano gives her pleasure to-night, who would begrudge it?”
No one, evidently, while Aunt Eunice was around. Penelope sank back in her chair, but there was a little crease, not at all becoming, in her high white forehead.
Meantime Caroline had “found her way,” easily enough, across the hall and into the long parlor, which was as long as the book room and the dining room put together. Such a big room, with pictures that frowned on her through the twilight that was deepening, here on the east side of the house. But neither the bigness of the room, nor the dimness of it could daunt Caroline, for at the farther end she saw the polished bulk of a grand piano.
She flew to it across the dark polished floor and the dusky rugs. There had been no piano at Cousin Delia’s, only a talking machine. Cousin Delia liked a fox trot or a coon song as well as the next one.
Caroline sat down on the piano bench. She poised her hands for a second over the white keys, almost afraid to touch them lest they melt away and vanish. Then very softly but firmly she struck a chord, and another, and another. How the piano sang in its deep, golden throat! Such a piano as her precious Muzzy had dreamed of having some time for their very own! Caroline struck more chords, and ran a scale to limber her little fingers, which had grown the least bit stiff with lack of exercise.