She even expressed some agitated interest in the great invention, inquiring when the first experiments with the little model Thunder Bird, upon a mountain-top, were to take place. And as for her husband, he boldly declared himself deeply interested in the conquest of the upper air and space--so far beyond the goal which any aviator had dreamed of reaching yet. He even went so far as to say that he would be glad to see the remainder of a fortune, represented by that third section of a will, go for the furtherance of the professor's wonderful moon-reaching, planet-reaching scheme, instead of being "hung up" awaiting the return of the dead man's younger brother who had been such a queer flimflam fellow in youth,--whose family did not even know whether he was dead or alive. And, at first, while the shell of that third nut was being solemnly cracked by the reading of opening sentences of the will--oh! how the heart of Pemrose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel--it did seem as if the kernel were going to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird. For now, according to the testator's wish, if his brother, Treffrey Graham, had not yet returned to claim his portion of his elder brother's wealth, then the money--a little bonanza, indeed, a solid fortune--was to be turned over, forthwith, to the University of his native city, to be used for developments in the science of the air--the upper air and what lay beyond it--chiefly for the furtherance of any inventions that might be put forward by the dead man's trusted friend, Professor Lorry. It was here that two pale girls, abruptly transformed from April primroses to June roses--oh! such pinkly blooming tea-roses--gave simultaneously a wild little shriek. It was here that Pem, dazzled, saw the Thunder Bird, with a clear sky, tear--tear away moonward--and noticed at the same time, through some little loophole in the watch-tower of her excitement, the figure of a man with a gray tourist's cap pulled down to his eyes, rather waveringly crossing the street without. He circled to avoid an April puddle,--she saw him clearly through the broad library window, at a distance of some fifty yards, beyond a flight of marble steps and a graveled entrance. A queer little shiver, a horrid little shiver--a snowflake in summer--drifted down her spine! The figure had an icy background. She had seen it before amid the terrors of that February train-wreck. The boy who saved her, the boy with the jolly tongue in his head, humorous amid the "horripilation," had addressed it as Dad. And then--then, she caught her breath sharply, as something blew upon her, hot and cold together--and came back to the library, to the present moment. For the gray-haired lawyer, with his mouth opening gravely, wide as a church door, with a little forward pounce of his body upon the typewritten sheets, the sheets that meant life or death--flight or stagnation--for the Thunder Bird, was beginning to read again.