Oswald would give her side looks of dumb appeal from time to time, for she had not once referred to anything so common as a trunk.  He must of felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face the dread future alone.  He probably figured that she’d had to give up about the trunk and was diverting attention from her surrender.  He hardly spoke a word and disappeared with a look of yearning when we left the table.  The rest of us went out on the porch.  Lydia was teasing the ukulele when Oswald appeared a few minutes later, with great excitement showing in his worn face.

“I can hear the keys no longer,” says he; “not a sound of them!  Mustn’t they have fallen from the hook?”

Lydia went on stripping little chords from the strings while she answered him in lofty accents.

“Keys?” she says.  “What keys?  What is the man talking of?  Oh, you mean that silly old trunk!  Are you really still maundering about that?  Of course the keys aren’t there!  I took them out when I opened it to-day.  I thought you wanted them taken out.  Wasn’t that what you wanted the trunk open for—­to get the keys?  Have I done something stupid?  Of course I can put them back and shut it again if you only want to listen to them.”

Oswald had been glaring at her with his mouth open like an Upper Triassic catfish.  He tried to speak, but couldn’t move his face, which seemed to be frozen.  Lydia goes on dealing off little tinkles of string music in a tired, bored way and turns confidentially to me to say she supposes there is really almost no society up here in the true sense of the word.

“You opened that trunk?” says Oswald at last in tones like a tragedian at his big scene.

Lydia turned to him quite prettily impatient, as if he was something she’d have to brush off in a minute.

“Dear, dear!” she says.  “Of course I opened it.  I told you again and again it was perfectly simple.  I don’t see why you made so much fuss about it.”

Oswald turned and galloped off to his room with a glad shout.  That showed the male of him, didn’t it?—­not staying for words of gratitude to his saviour, but beating it straight to the trunk.

Lydia got up and swaggered after him.  She had been swaggering all the evening.  She acted like a duchess at a slumming party.  The Prof and I followed her.

Oswald was teetering the trunk in the old familiar way, with one ear fastened to its shiny side.

“It’s true!  It’s true!” he says in hushed tones.  “The keys are gone.”

“Naughty, naughty!” says Lydia.  “Haven’t I told you I took them out?”

Oswald went over and set limply down on his bed, while we stood in the doorway.

“How did you ever do it?” says he with shining eyes.

“It was perfectly simple,” says Lydia.  “I simply opened it—­that’s all!”

“I have always suspected that the great secret of life would be almost too simple when once solved,” says the Prof.