“I’m afraid I’ve done something.  I’m really afraid I have.”

He had me in a fine state by this time.  The only thing I could think of was that he had killed the Prof by accident.  I waited for the horrible details, being too scared to ask questions.

“I’m afraid,” he says, “that I’ve locked the keys of my new trunk inside of it.  I’m afraid I really have!  And what does one do in such a case?”

I nearly broke down then.  I was in grave danger of fatal hysterics.  I suffered from the reaction.  I couldn’t trust myself; so I got over to the door, where my face wouldn’t show, and called to the Prof and Lydia.  I now heard them out on the porch.  Then I edged outside the door, where people wouldn’t be quite so scared if I lost control of myself and yelled.

Then these two went in and listened to Oswald’s solemn words.  The Prof helped me out a lot.  He yelled good.  He yelled his head off; and under cover of his tumult I managed to get in a few whoops of my own, so that I could once more act something like a lady when I went in.

Lydia, the porch wren, was the only one to take Oswald’s bereavement at all decent.  The chit was sucking a stick of candy she had shoved down into a lemon.  Having run out of town candy, one of the boys had fetched her some of the old-fashioned stick kind, with pink stripes; she would ram one of these down to the bottom of a lemon and suck up the juice through the candy.  She looked entirely useless while she was doing this, and yet she was the only one to show any human sympathy.

She asked the stricken man how it happened, and he told the whole horrible story—­how he always kept the keys hanging on this little brass hook inside the trunk so he would know where they was, and how he had shut the trunk in a hurry to get it out of the way of the table legs, and the spring lock had snapped.  And what did one do now—­if anything?

“Why, it’s perfectly simple!  You open it some other way,” says Lydia.

“Ah, but how?” says Oswald.  “Those trunks are superbly built.  How can one?”

“Oh, it must be easy,” says Lydia, still clinging to her candy sour.  “I’ll open it for you to-morrow if you will remind me.”

“Remind you?” says Oswald in low, tragic tones.  You could see he was never going to think of anything else the rest of his life.

By this time the Prof and I had controlled our heartless merriment; so we all traipsed in to the scene of this here calamity and looked at the shut trunk.  It was shut good; no doubt about that.  There was also no doubt about the keys being inside.

“You can hear them rattle!” says the awed Oswald, teetering the trunk on one corner.  So each one of us took a turn and teetered the trunk back and forth and heard the imprisoned keys jingle against the side where they was hung.

“But what’s to be done?” says Oswald.  “Of course something must be done.”  That seemed to be about where Oswald got off.