The begoggled face turned toward her.  There was a perceptible tensity in the line of the jaw.  But the beetle man made no answer.

“Now, if I could see behind those glasses,” said Miss Polly Brewster to her wicked little self, “I’d probably bite myself rather than say it again.  Just the same—­And a little bit sorry?” she persisted aloud.

“Does that matter?” said the man quietly.

Miss Polly Brewster forthwith bit herself on her pink and wayward tongue.

“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” she employed that chastened member to say.  “I am, most deeply.  So will father be, even if he decides not to leave.  I’m afraid that’s what he will decide.”

“He mustn’t.”

“Tell him that yourself.”

“I will, if it becomes necessary.”

“Let me be present at the interview.  Most people are afraid of dad.  Perhaps you’d be, too.”

“I could always run away,” he remarked, unsmiling.  “You know how well I do it.”

“I must do it now myself, and get arrayed for the daily tea sacrifice.  Au revoir.”

“Hasta manana,” he said absently.

She had turned to go, but at the word she came slowly back a pace or two, smiling.

“What a strange beetle man you are!” she said softly.  “I have no other friends like you.  You are a friend, aren’t you, in your queer way?” She did not wait for an answer, but went on:  “You don’t come to see me when I ask you.  You don’t send me any word.  You make me feel that, compared to your concerns with beetles and flies, I’m quite hopelessly unimportant.  And yet here I find you giving up your own pursuits and wasting your time to plan and watch and think for us.”

“For you,” he corrected.

“For me,” she accepted sweetly.  “What an ungrateful little pig you must think me!  But truly inside I appreciate it and thank you, and I think—­I feel that perhaps it amounts to a lot more than I know.”

He made a gesture of negation.

“No great thing,” he said.  “But it’s the best I can do, anyway.  Do you remember what the mediaeval mummer said, when he came bearing his poor homage?”

“No.  Tell it to me.”

“It runs like this:  ’Lady, who art nowise bitter to those who serve you with a good intent, that which thy servant is, that he is for you.’”

“Polly Brewster,” said the girl to herself, as she walked, slowly and musingly, back to her room, “the busy haunts of men are more suited to your style than the free-and-untrammeled spaces of nature, and well you know it.  But you’ll go to-morrow and you’ll keep on going until you find out what is behind those brown-green goblin spectacles.  If only he didn’t look so like a gnome!”

The clause conditional, introduced by the word “if,” does not always imply a conclusion, even in the mind of the propounder.  Miss Brewster would have been hard put to it to round out her subjunctive.