any questions. I saw it must be some private grief; so I got
the whisky. It happened I had just one bottle in the house, and that was
some perfectly terrible whisky that had been sent me by mistake. It was
liquid barbed wire. Even a little drink of it would of been severe. Two
drinks would make you climb a tree like a monkey. But the stricken Oswald
seemed able to outfight it. He poured out half a tumblerful, drunk it
neat and refused water. He strangled some, for he was only human after
all. Then he sagged down on the couch and looked up at me with a feeble
and pathetic grin and says:

"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