. 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.

Lydia had now become more superior than ever. She swaggered round the
room, and when she didn't swagger she strutted. And she says to Oswald:

"I'm going to make one little suggestion, because you seem so utterly
helpless: You must get a nice doormat to lay directly in front of your
trunk, and you must always keep the key under this mat. Lock the trunk
and hide the key there. It's what people always do, and it will be quite
safe, because no one would ever think of looking under a doormat for a
key. Now isn't that a perfectly darling plan?"

Oswald had looked serious and attentive when she begun this talk, but he
finally got suspicious that she was making some silly kind of a joke. He
grinned at her very foolish and again says: "You wonderful woman!" It was
a caressing tone--if you know what I mean.

Lydia says "Oh, dear, won't he ever stop his silly chatter about his
stupid old trunk?" It seems to her that nothing but trunk has been talked
of in this house for untold ages. She's tired to death of the very word.
Then she links her arm in mine in a sweet girlish fashion and leads me
outside, where she becomes a mere twittering porch wren once more.

Oswald followed, you can bet. And every five minutes he'd ask her how did
she ever--really now--open the trunk. But whenever he'd ask she would put
the loud pedal on