She paused a moment and looked down on the happy young people. She wondered if they realized how happy they were or if it would be necessary to be old to appreciate the blessing of merely being young. Suddenly a picture of her youth came back to her with a poignancy that almost hurt. It was in that very hall and she was standing on those very stairs--perhaps in that self-same spot. There was a house party at Buck Hill and she had come from Peyton only that morning in a brand new carriage with Billy driving the spanking pair of nags. Billy was young then, but so trustworthy that her father had been willing to let him take charge of his daughter. She remembered the rejoicing in the family when she arrived. How they gathered around her and embraced her! Robert Bucknor, the father of the present owner, was then a young man. How gentle and tender he was with her, how courtly and kind! When he saw her standing alone on the stairs looking down on the assembled company he had sprung up the steps, two at a time, and taken her hand in his: "Oh, Cousin Ann, how beautiful you are! If I could only feel that the time might come when this would be your home--yours and mine." And she had answered, "Not yet, Cousin Robert, please don't talk about it yet," because the memory of Bert Mason, the young lover who had been killed in the war, was still too vivid for her to think of other ties. "But you are very dear to me and if ever--" Thus she had put him off. While she had stood there talking to Robert Bucknor--young then and now old and dead and gone--Billy, with ashen face, had come to her with the news that Peyton, her beloved home, was completely destroyed by fire. She had fainted. Young ladies usually fainted in those days when overcome by emotion. How the friends and cousins rallied around her with offers of assistance! They actually quarreled about her, so eager were they for her to visit them. "You must make your home with me." "No, with me!" "I must have part of her." "My turn is next," and so on. And then the owner of Buck Hill and his sweet wife had told her that their home was hers and she was ever to feel as free to be there as though she had been truly a daughter of the house. Then had begun the years of visiting for Ann Peyton. Her father had died a few weeks after the fire and later an only brother. She had more invitations to visit than she knew what to do with. Billy had been welcome, too, and there was always stable room for her horses and a place in the coach house for her carriage, no matter where she visited.