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.

Pemrose had kept her word about not speaking. She just dropped one
pointed little icicle in the shape of a nod upon her one-time friend as
she sank into her own swivel chair and threw of