rl 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!

"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