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 to say apologetic.
She was quite sure now that any man who could turn out a daughter, not yet sixteen, to behave in a fearful emergency as Pem had done–without whom her own daughter would not be here to-day, as Una constantly kept repeating–could never forge a gun, be it rocket or rifle, that would hit no mark!
She even expressed some agitated interest in the great invention, inquiring when the first experiments with the little model Thunder Bird, upon a mountain-top, were to take place.
And as for her husband, he boldly declared himself deeply interested in the conquest of the upper air and space–so far beyond the goal which any aviator had dreamed of reaching yet.
He even went so far as to say that he would be glad to see the remainder of a fortune, represented by that third section of a will, go for the furtherance of the professor’s wonderful moon-reaching, planet-reaching scheme, instead of being “hung up” awaiting the return of the dead man’s younger brother who had been such a queer flimflam fellow in youth,–whose family did not even know whether he was dead or alive.
And, at first, while the shell of that third nut was being solemnly cracked by the reading of opening sentences of the will–oh! how the heart of Pemrose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel–it did seem as if the kernel were going to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird.