“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 mediæval 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.
VI.
FORKED TONGUES
“Pooh!” said Thatcher Brewster.