XIII One afternoon, about a week later, as Ann Boyd sat in her weaving-room twisting bunches of carded wool into yarn on her old spinning-wheel, the whir of which on her busy days could be heard by persons passing along the road in front of her gate, a shadow fell on her floor, and, looking up, she saw a tall, handsome young man in the doorway, holding his hat in one hand, a valise in the other. He said nothing, but only stood smiling, as if in hearty enjoyment of the surprise he was giving her. "Luke King!" she exclaimed. "You, of all people on the face of the earth!" "Yes, Aunt Ann"—he had always addressed her in that way—"here I am, like a bad coin, always turning up." The yellow bunches of wool fell to the floor as she rose up and held out her hand. "You know I’m glad to see you, my boy," she said, "but I wasn’t expecting you; I don’t know as I ever looked for you to come back here again, where you’ve had such a hard time of it. When you wrote me you was the chief editor of a paying paper out there, I said to myself that you’d never care to work here in the mountains, where there is so little to be made by a brainy man." "If I were to tell you the main thing that brought me back you’d certainly scold me," he laughed; "but I never hid a fault from you, Aunt Ann. The truth is, good, old-fashioned home-sickness is at the bottom of it." "Homesickness, for _this_?" Ann sneered contemptuously, as she waved her hand broadly—"homesick for the hard bed you had at your step-father’s, in a pine-pole cabin, with a mud chimney and windows without glass, when you’ve been the equal, out there, of the highest and best in the land, and among folks that could and would appreciate your talents and energy and were able to pay cash for it at the highest market-price?" "You don’t understand, Aunt Ann." He flushed sensitively under her stare of disapproval as he sat down in a chair near her wheel. "Maybe you never did understand me thoroughly. I always had a big stock of sentiment that I couldn’t entirely kill. Aunt Ann, all my life away has only made me love these old mountains, hills, and valleys more than ever, and, finally, when a good opportunity presented itself, as—"