Ever After Read Online Free Page A

grand piano, still enclosed, legs and all, in its raw pine packing-case, stood impressively blocking the path which led from the gate between low clipped box hedges to the porch steps. Three men from the express company, Micah the Spragues’ coloured butler, Shadrach their gardener, and two little coloured boys stood around it in attitudes of patient despair.
    They all brightened visibly when Sedgwick and Sue appeared at the gate, and they watched the approach of the master of the house with cautious hope. The small coloured child who attended him ran ahead into the house to announce his arrival, and Melicent came out on to the porch with a shawl around her shoulders. She was followed by Phoebe, who looked just like her mother and was nearly sixteen. Fitz was nowhere.
    Melicent, who had once or twice rather wished for a grand piano herself, was not so sure now. She was pretty and brown-haired, and her mouth turned up at the corners and she was the first to admit that she adored Sedgwick to the verge of lunacy.
    “Hello, darling!” she cried at sight of him. “Hello, Sue! What ever are we going to do with this thing?” But even while she tried to look vexed it was plain that she thought the grand piano great fun. To Melicent almost everything was fun that happened to her since her marriage to Sedgwick had rescued her from the gloomy household which had imprisoned her childhood. Both she and Phoebe looked to him for the instant solution of any dilemma.Their bright, waiting eyes were now full of confidence that a grand piano more or less would be nothing to him.
    “Where’s Fitz?” asked Sedgwick, eyeing the packing-case warily. “It’s his problem, after all.”
    “He’s gone down to the Carters’, I think. He didn’t say when he would be home. But it can’t just go on sitting there, can it!”
    “And of course it won’t be quite so big when it’s been uncrated,” Sue murmered at his elbow.
    Sedgwick sent for tools and the men from the express company began to knock the crate apart, there in the path, while the family went in to look at the parlour and see what could be done there. It was not a small room, but it had been lived in a great many years, and things had accumulated. By actual measurement Sedgwick discovered that the piano would fit nicely into the corner to the left of the bow window, provided that several familiar pieces of furniture, including the old upright, were done away with. These were removed by Micah and Shadrach to stand somewhat at random in the middle of the library floor, and a way was cleared for Sally’s gift.
    Before these arrangements could be completed, however, Fitz turned in at the gate and came rather dazedly up the path. Sue was the first to see him, and she went out on the porch and then, instead of hailing him, stood watching the lad who was, in spite of everything, her favourite of all the younger generation.
    Fitz stood in the brick path between the low box hedges, gazing at the grand piano, most of whose dark glossy surface was now uncovered. He stood quite motionless, with his hat pushed back on his high, round forehead, just taking it in. Fitz was of average height, and slouched a little, not making the most of his inches. His eyes were a clear grey, with a dark-ringed iris, and long curving lashes enhanced their natural candour. His nose was straight and good, his lips sensitive yet firm, his face, broad at the eye level, narrowed to a boyish chin. His clothes were always casual, and yet he always looked exceedingly clean. Because his gentle voice drawled more than the rest of them did, they told him he talked like a darky, but nobody had ever heard him raise it for emphasis. As always, Sue’s heart crinkled with foolish love of him.
    Hypnotized by the piano, he failed to see her standing there on the porch looking down at him. With a last crack of wood and the scream of long nails wrenched loose, the pine case came away, and the men with the hammers and