n't, I
can always sell out to Simon Harding. You know he said that his offer
held good at any time."

"I know that, Roy," rejoined Peggy, seriously, "but we could never do
that. We could neither of us go against father's wishes like that.
He--well, Roy, it's not to be thought of. Poor dad----"

Her bright eyes filled with tears as her mind travelled back to a scene
of a year before when Mr. Prescott had ceased from troubling with the
affairs of this world, and commended his children to the care of their
maiden aunt--his sister with whom, since their mother's death some years
before, the little family had made their home.

Poor Mr. Prescott had been that hopelessly impracticable creature--an
inventor. Fortunately for himself, however, he had a small fortune of his
own so that he had been enabled to carry on his dreaming and planning
without embarrassing his family. Roy and Peggy had both been sent to good
boarding schools, and had known, in fact, very little of home life after
their mother's death which had occurred several years before, as already
said.

Mr. Prescott, in his dreamy, abstract way, had cared dearly for his
children. But those other children of his--the offsprings of his
brain--that surrounded him in his workshop, had, somehow, seemed always
to mean more to him. And so the young Prescotts had grown up without the
benefit of home influences.

On Peggy's naturally sweet, vivacious character, this had not made so
much difference. But Roy had developed, in spite of his real sterling
worth and ability, into a headstrong, rather self-opinionated lad. His
success at school in athletics and the studies which he cared about
"mugging" at had not tended to decrease these qualities.

It had come as a shock to both of them a year before when two telegrams
had been despatched--one to Peggy's school up the Hudson, and the other
to Roy up in Connecticut, telling them to return to the Long Island
village of Sandy Bay at once. Their father--that half-shadowy being--was
very ill.

The messages had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation. Three
days after his children reached his side Mr. Prescott gently breathed his
last, dying, as he had lived, so quietly, that the end had come before
they realized it. But in those last brief moments Roy came to know his
father better than ever before. He learned that the dream of his parent
had been to produce an aeroplane free from the defects of its
forerunners,--a safe