“It only needed a bit of thought,” says the chit.

Then Oswald must of had a sudden pang of fear.  He flew over and examined the lock and all the front surface of his treasure.  He was looking for signs of rough work, thinking she might of broken into it in some coarse manner.  But not a scratch could he find.  He looked up at Lydia out of eyes moist with gratitude.

“You wonderful, wonderful woman!” says he, and any one could know he meant it from the heart out.

Lydia was still superior and languid, and covered up a slight yawn.  She said she was glad if any little thing she could do had made life pleasanter for him.  This has been such a perfectly simple thing—­very, very far from wonderful.

Oswald now begun to caper round the room like an Airedale pup, and says let’s have the keys and open the trunk up, so he can believe his own eyes.

Then Lydia trifled once more with a human soul.  She froze in deep thought a long minute then says: 

“Oh, dear!  Now what did I do with those wretched old keys?”

Oswald froze, too, with a new agony.  Lydia put a hand to her pale forehead and seemed to try to remember.  There was an awful silence.  Oswald was dashed over the cliff again.

“Can’t you think?” says the wounded man.  “Can’t you remember?  Try!  Try!”

“Now let me see,” says Lydia.  “I know I had them out in the living room—­”

“Why did you ever take them out there?” demands Oswald in great terror; but the heroine pays no attention whatever to this.

“—­and later, I think—­I think—­I must have carried them into my room.  Oh, yes; now I remember I did.  And then I emptied my wastebasket into the kitchen stove.  Now I wonder if they could have been in with that rubbish I burned!  Let me think!” And she thought again deeply.

Oswald give a hollow groan, like some of the very finest chords in his being had been tore asunder.  He sunk limp on the bed again.

“Wouldn’t it be awkward if they were in that rubbish?” says Lydia.  “Do you suppose that fire would destroy the silly things?  Let me think again.”

The fiend kept this up for three minutes more.  It must of seemed longer to Oswald than it takes for a chinch bug to become a carboniferous Jurassic.  She was committing sabotage on him in the cruellest way.  Then, after watching his death agony with cold eyes and pretending to wonder like a rattled angel, she brightens up and says: 

“Oh, goody!  Now I remember everything.  I placed them right here.”  And she picked the keys off the table, where they had been hid under some specimens of the dead and gone.

Oswald give one athletic leap and had the precious things out of her feeble grasp in half a second.  His fingers trembled horrible, but he had a key in the lock and turned it and threw the sides of the grand old monument wide open.  He just hung there a minute in ecstasy, fondling the keys and getting his nerve back.  Then he turns again on Lydia the look of a proud man who is ready to surrender his whole future life to her keeping.