CHAPTER XXII
A Great Transformation
It was unbelievable that a lumbering coach, with two fat horses, an old lady in a hoop skirt and a bow-legged coachman, could have disappeared from the face of the earth. Nevertheless, this seemed the case. Nobody knew where Cousin Ann had gone. Telephones were ringing into the night in vain attempts to trace the old lady. It had never made much difference to anyone before where Miss Ann had gone. For many years she had been leaving one relation’s home and arriving at another’s, and the comings and goings of Cousin Ann had created but a small ripple in family affairs. She had never deigned to say where next she intended to visit, so why now should the cousins be so disturbed over her whereabouts?
“I am so afraid something has happened to her,” said Mr. Bob Bucknor. “I’ll never forgive myself if Cousin Ann is in trouble, when I have literally driven her from my house.”
“But, my dear, you have not driven her from 229 your home,” comforted his wife. “You had only intended to inform her that we were planning a trip abroad and she would have to visit somewhere else until arrangements could be made for her to be established in an old ladies’ home. There was nothing cruel in that.”
“Ah, but Cousin Ann is so proud and Buck Hill has always been a refuge for her.”
The other cousins were likewise agitated. For Cousin Ann to have disappeared just as they were contemplating wounding her made them think that they had already wounded her. “Poor old lady!” was all they could say, and all of them said it until their women-folk were exceedingly bored with the remark.
Mr. Bob Bucknor determined to send for Jeff, if something definite was not heard of the missing cousin within the next twenty-four hours. He vaguely felt that it might be time for the law to step in and help in the search.
In the meantime Miss Ann was very happy in the house built by Ezra Knight; and Uncle Billy was even happier in the cabin built by the Bucks of old. The Peyton coach stood peacefully in the carriage house, with the bees buzzing sleepily, free to come and go in their subway nest somewhere under the back seat. Cupid and Puck wandered in the blue-grass 230 meadow, content as though they had been put to graze in the Elysian fields.
The first night under the roof of her newly recognized cousins was a novel one for Miss Ann. She had gone to bed not in the least bored, but very tired—tired from actual labor. In the first place, she had helped wipe all the many dishes accumulated from the motormen’s dinners and then put them away. That task completed, she had become interested in Judith’s work of mounting photographs—an order lately received and one that must be rushed.