"Oh, you are just like the rest, after all. I’d hoped to the contrary," Ann sighed. "But don’t think I’m not glad to see you, Luke." Her voice shook slightly. "God knows I’ve prayed for a sight of the one face among all these here in the mountains that seemed to respect me, but there was another side to the matter. I wanted to feel, Luke, that I had done you some actual good in the world—that the education I helped you to get was going to lift you high above the average man. When you wrote about all your good-luck out there, the big salary, the interest the stockholders had given you in the paper that bid fair to make a pile of money, and stood so high in political influence, I was delighted; but, Luke, if a sentimental longing for these heartless red hills and their narrow, hide-bound inhabitants has caused you actually to throw up—" "Oh, it’s really not so bad as that," King hastened to say. "The truth is—though I really _was_ trying to keep from bragging about my good-fortune before I’d had a chance to ask after your health—the truth is, Aunt Ann, it’s business that really brings me back, though I confess it was partly for sentimental reasons that I decided on the change. It’s this way: A company has been formed in Atlanta to run a daily paper on somewhat similar lines to the one we had in the West, and the promoters of it, it seems, have been watching my work, and that sort of thing, and so, only a few days ago, they wrote offering me a good salary to assume chief charge and management of the new paper. At first I declined, in a deliberate letter, but they wouldn’t have it that way—they telegraphed me that they would not listen to a refusal, and offered me the same financial interest as the one I held." "Ah, they did, eh?" Ann’s eye for business was gleaming. "They offered you as good as you had?" "Better, as it has turned out, Aunt Ann," said King, modestly, "for when my associates out there read the proposition, they said it was my duty to myself to accept, and with that they took my stock off my hands. They paid me ten thousand dollars in cash, Aunt Ann. I’ve got that much ready money and a position that is likely to be even better than the one I had. So, you see, all my home-sickness—" "Ten thousand dollars!" Ann cried, her strong face full of gratification. "Ten thousand dollars for my sturdy mountain-boy! Ah, that will open the eyes of some of these indolent know-it-all louts who said the money spent on your education was thrown in the fire. You are all right, Luke. I’m a judge of human stock as well as cattle and horses. If you’d been a light fellow you’d have dropped me when you began to rise out there; but you didn’t. Your letters have been about the only solace I’ve had here in all my loneliness and strife, and here you are to see me as soon as you come—that is, I reckon, you haven’t been here many days."