"I heard he did. Somebody said so--somebody who met him out West, years ago--that he was a widower, with a little son. But--apparently--he has no more use for his family." "No more--no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham's death--and not her husband!" Now it was an entirely new breeze of excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged as the blades in the box beneath it. "Oh-h, yes! she's at daggers dr-rawn with us now--on her high ropes all the time, as you'd say. And--and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket, the rocket," half-hysterically, "the moon-reaching rocket,--a Quaker gun--a Quaker gun that'll never be fired, never go off--never hit anything!... _Oh-h!_" With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the girl bounded, blindly as a ball, from her box, across the laboratory--and on to a low platform. Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp the knowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns; that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all that was impotent--non-existent in reason and power--a dummy. Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearing its brazen height from this low pedestal. Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a February world, equally white, of zero ice and snow. Through the spectroscope she saw a world in flames--blood-red. It was not more flaming than her thoughts. Her father's transcendent invention just a faddist's dream! The Thunder Bird a joke--a _Quaker Gun_! "Bah!" Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as she adjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzing light--reducing it to prismatic hues--a little. And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced--her orange--the snow being a wonderful reflector of the sun's divided rays. "Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! If her mother made that hor-rid speech about a Quaker gun, she repeated it, before all the boys and girls in our Drama Class, too! If I see her this afternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan't speak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why--" the girl fluttered now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform--"why, we used to stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to be the longer. I'll wager mine are now!" With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of the spectroscope. Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her--of his maiden of the patchwork name--the Rose side of her, and he loved it!