“Men are strange creatures,” mused the philosopher of twenty. “You think they are perfectly horrid, and suddenly they show their other side to you, and you think they are perfectly splendid. I wish I knew a little more about real people.”
She confessed to no more specific thought, but as she descended the stairs to bid farewell to the blushing and deprecatory Britons, she was eager to have it over with, and to come to speech with her beetle man, who had so strangely flamed into action. The Unspeakable Perk! As the name formed on her lips, she smiled tenderly. With sad lack of logic, she was ready to discard every suspicion of him that she had harbored, merely on the strength of his reckless outbreak of patriotism. She looked about the patio, but he was not there. Sherwen came out of a side door, his face puckered with anxiety.
“Where is Mr. Perkins?” she asked.
“In there.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Your father is with him. Perhaps you’d better go in.”
With a chill at her heart, Polly entered the room, where Mr. Brewster bent a troubled face over a head swathed in reddened bandages.
Very crumpled and limp looked the Unspeakable Perk, bunched humpily upon the little sofa. His goggles had fallen off, and lay on the floor beside him, contriving somehow to look momentously solemn and important all by themselves. His face was turned half away, and, as Polly’s gaze fell upon it, she felt again that queer catch at her heart.
“Wouldn’t know it was the same chap, would you?” whispered Mr. Brewster.
The girl picked up the grotesque spectacles, cradling them for an instant in her hands before she put them aside and leaned over the quiet form.
“Came staggering in, and just collapsed down there,” continued her father huskily. “Lord, I wouldn’t lose that boy after this for a million dollars!”
“Why do you talk that way?” she demanded sharply. “What has happened? Did he faint?”