"But--but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that's away outside the city line--out at Merryville," he exclaimed, a minute later, in consternation. "Goodness! child, you're not going off there to ski to-day--in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?" "Oh! the trains--the trains aren't held up, father." The coaxing weathercock now had a green arm around the neck of the man in the long, drab coat. "And I just couldn't give up going! I'm becoming such a daring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you'll be proud of me when you see! Why! I can almost herring-bone uphill; and I'm getting the kick-turn 'down fine.' Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill--oh! it's such perfect fun, such creamy fun; I'm not a girl any longer, I'm just a swallow." "One swallow doesn't make a summer; all this doesn't change the weather." The inventor glanced anxiously through a window. "No, but it's such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on the two o'clock express bound north, why--why! the very train that you and I will be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try out experiments with that little model rocket you're working on now, upon old Mount Greylock--highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever a girl's thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button and start it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send you back your golden egg, siree--the first record from space. Oh! through all the fun of slope and snow I'll be thinking of that the entire time to-day--the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!" CHAPTER II GIMCRACK ICE She was thinking of it two hours later--having gained her coaxing point--seated in the well-nigh empty parlor car of the north-bound express, that green-aisled Pullman being the first car behind the cab and plodding engine which, regardless of schedule, crept along slowly and warily to-day upon ice-shod rails. But as she caressed the honorable thumb--the little girlish member which would press the button while all the world wondered--and peered out through a window fairly frosted, lo! again she saw a landscape dimly in flames--blood-red--as viewed through the spectroscope of her own raging thoughts. For ice was within the car, as without. There--there, seated almost on a line with her, on the other side of the moss-green aisle, and only three other distant passengers in the compartment, was the girl whose caricaturing tongue had repeated the indelible insult about a Quaker gun; whose mother considered her father a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, with his visions of bridging the absolute zero of space--just a mild three hundred degrees, or so, lower than the biting breath of Mother Earth at the present moment--and reaching worlds far away amid the starry scope.