twenty years ago and hasn't sent a line to his family since."

"Was Mr. Treffrey Graham--really--such a--zany?" Pem asked the question
for the nineteenth time, her black eyebrows arching.

"My word! 'Was he?' A--a regular hippogriff he was, child! A hot tamale,
like that Mexican fruit which burns you if you bite into it! At college
one could hardly come near him without getting scorched by his tricks.
Remember my telling you about my putting in an appearance in class one
day--Physics 3--boasting of the latest thing in student's bags, setting
it down beside me--and not seeing it again for three weeks? The terrible
Treff, of course! The climax came, as you know, when he locked a
gray-haired professor into the padded cell for opposing baseball too
early in the season, while the campus was still soft."

"Mer-rcy! And kept him there for ages--in that stuffy little room, all
wadded and lined with brown burlap, used for analyzing sound--the prof
not able to make himself heard!"

The listener, girl-like, drew fresh excitement from a faded tale.

"Yes--that meant expulsion, of course, and his family, one and all,
turning a cold shoulder on Treff, before he went away for good--nobody
knew where. His engagement was broken off. His brother Hartley saw to
that--married the girl himself."

"I wonder--I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?" Pem musingly
nursed her chin,--and with it a wildfire interest in the "hot tamale."

"I heard he did. Somebody said so--somebody who met him out West, years
ago--that he was a widower, with a little son. But--apparently--he has
no more use for his family."

"No more--no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you
were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three
drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham's
death--and not her husband!" Now it was an entirely new breeze of
excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green
figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged
as the blades in the box beneath it. "Oh-h, yes! she's at daggers
dr-rawn with us now--on her high ropes all the time, as you'd say.
And--and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket,
the rocket," half-hysterically, "the moon-reaching rocket,--a Quaker
gun--a Quaker gun that'll never be fired, never go off--never hit
anything!... _Oh-h!_"

With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the gi