She was
the only heir to his large fortune.
Preston Cheney was a penniless young man from the West. A self-made
youth, with an unusual brain and an overwhelming ambition, he had
risen from chore boy on a western farm to printer's apprentice in a
small town, thence to reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent,
and after two or three years of travel gained in this manner he had
come to Beryngford and bought out a struggling morning paper, which
was making a mad effort to keep alive, changed its political
tendencies, infused it with western activity and filled it with
cosmopolitan news, and now, after eighteen months, the young man
found himself coming abreast of his two long established rivals in
the editorial field. This success was but an incentive to his
overwhelming ambition for place, power and riches. He had seen just
enough of life and of the world to estimate these things at double
their value; and he was, beside, looking at life through the
magnifying glass of youth. The Creator intended us to gaze on
worldly possessions and selfish ambitions through the small end of
the lorgnette, but youth invariably inverts the glass.
To the young editor, the brief years behind him seemed like a long
hard pull up a steep and rocky cliff. From the point to which he had
attained, the summit of his desires looked very far away, much
farther than the level from which he had arisen.
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