which she had
spoken a little while ago in her father's laboratory, had not yet been
cracked: the third mysterious drawer containing the third and last
installment of a dead man's very strange will had not yet been opened.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND WRECK

That third nut was cracked just five weeks later in the firelit library
of what had been Mr. Hartley Graham's home--the home of a man who during
his lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had been, in some ways,
almost as eccentric as his madcap brother--and concerning the latter his
college chums, those who knew him long ago, were of the opinion that he
was a freak whose "head grew beneath his shoulder."

The house, a white marble mansion on Opal Avenue, finest of the old
residential streets in the University city of Clevedon, was now occupied
by the sister of the two, the mother of Una, who had snapped her fingers
at the Thunder Bird, calling it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun.

That jeering nickname still rankled in the breast of Pemrose, who looked
more like a colorless March Primrose, owing to the lingering shock of
that train wreck, upon the spring morning in early April when the family
lawyer whose duty it was to settle the affairs of the man who had left
three separate portions of his will in as many drawers, to be opened on
three successive anniversaries of his death, drew forth the last.

She was not the only pale girl present.

By her side was Una, neighbor again in heart as in body, who laid one
little agitated fist on Pem's knee while preparations for reading the
will were being made, the two girls nestling together, as in chummy
days, three years before, when in the peacock pride of thirteen they had
conceitedly measured eyelashes.

And the remorseful affection mirrored in that little near-sighted stand
in one of Una's pretty dark eyes was only typical of an entirely similar
state of feeling in the once scornful breasts of her father and mother.

Mrs. Grosvenor was no longer "on her high ropes," as Pem had said in her
father's laboratory; to-day she seemed to be, rather, on a snubbing-line
which brought her up short now and again, even in the middle of a
speech, when she looked at the inventor's blue-eyed daughter, his trusty
little pal--and that, sometimes, with spray in her eyes, too.

Also, her glances in the direction of the inventor himself, Professor
Lorry, with whose name the world was already beginning to ring, were
appealing--not