"Well--well, it's coming to you, Pem--you sprite." Her father shot a sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket into its groove in the larger one's interior, where the touch of a mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird's tail, would ignite it in flight. "You alone, girl as you are, know the full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the principle on which I am working, child--in so far as you can understand it--in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the moon itself--Mars, too, maybe--you alone know and you have kept it dark. You've plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school, so's to be _able_ to understand and sympathize--you've lived up to the name I gave you--" "My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily. "Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guess you've been son and daughter both, you good little pal--you sprite of the lab." "Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--I'm so glad." Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor's side, took the humbler place she loved,--fellow of her father's heart. "I--I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that bettered the betty element a little," she confided, the spice of her mixed cognomen floating in her eye. It was a joke with her, that chowchow name--original mixture--and how she came by it. Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil University,--Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,--wearing his symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her ceremonial dress--had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his heart, of conquering not the air alone but space--zero space, in which it was thought nothing could travel--so that old Earth might reach out to her sister planets. He planned to call the boy Pemberton after his own father. Likewise the mother of the maiden in green now seated upon the tool-box had longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memory of a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth. And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she opened upon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he had cried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart of disappointment: "Oh! by Jove, I can't quite give up my dream: let's name her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, I'd have called her Pem." The young mother blissfully agreed--and did not live long to call her anything.