have better music this year, and how the
assembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by
the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much
room but weighed little.

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felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face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 slumm