"Ah, you were in a fix!" Ann said. "That is, it was awkward for you, who I know to be almost too sincere for your own good."
"Well, I couldn't let it pass, Aunt Ann—I simply couldn't let all those men leave that table under a wrong impression. I hardly know what I said when I replied, but it seemed to be the right thing, for they all applauded me. I told him I did not belong to what was generally understood to be the old aristocracy of the South, but to what I considered the new. I told them about our log-cabin aristocracy, Aunt Ann, here in these blue mountains, for which my soul was famished. I told them of the sturdy, hard-working, half-starved mountaineers and their scratching, with dull tools, a bare existence out of this rocky soil. I told them of my bleak and barren boyhood, my heart-burnings at home, when my mother married again, the nights I'd spent at study in the light of pine-knots that filled the house with smoke. Then I told them about the grandest woman God ever brought to life. I told them about you, Aunt Ann. I gave no names, went into no painful particulars, but I talked about what you had done for me, and how you've been persecuted and misunderstood, till I could hardly hold back the tears from my eyes."
"Oh, hush, Luke," Ann said, huskily—"hush up!"
"Well, I may now, but I couldn't that night," said King. "I got started, and it came out of me like a flood. I said things about you that night that I've thought for years, but which you never would let me say to you."
"Hush, Luke, hush—you are a good boy, but you mustn't—" Ann's voice broke, and she placed her hand to her eyes.
"There was a celebrated novelist there," King went on, "and after dinner he came over to me and held out his hand. He was old and white-haired, and his face was full of tender, poetic emotion. 'If you ever meet your benefactress again,' he said, 'tell her I'd give half my life to know her. If I'd known her I could write a book that would be immortal.'"
There was a pause. Ann seemed to be trying to crush out some obstruction to deliberate utterance in her big, throbbing throat.
"If he knew my life just as it has been," she said, finally—"if he knew it all—all that I've been through, all I've thought through it all, from the time I was an innocent, laughing girl 'till now, as an old woman, I'm fighting a battle of hate with every living soul within miles of me—if he knew all that, he could write a book, and it would be a big one. But it wouldn't help humanity, Luke. My hate's mine, and the devil's. It's not for folks born lucky and happy. Some folks seem put on earth for love. I'm put here for hate and for joy over the misfortune of my enemies."
"You know many things, Aunt Ann," King said, softly, "and you are older than I am, but you can't see the end of it all as clearly as I do."
"You think not, my boy?"