the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You
and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and
demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off--and
got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He
said the answer would prove to be too brutally simple, and he always
wanted to keep it in his thought life as a mystery. It looked like he'd
have to. I was dying to know myself, but had sense enough not to ask.

The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these
cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice.
And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy
trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few
things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had
the game won.

Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he
could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even
that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high
and bull-tight. Of course it's possible he was landed by the earnest wish
to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him
that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor
Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was
time for her to settle down.

We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines
round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about
to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she
hadn't decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game,
that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him--to
say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna.

* * * * *

Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty altitude of the
Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with
his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk?
Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it
with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told.

"Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She'd been honest with the
hairpins. She didn't tell me till the day before they were leaving. 'It
was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought,' she
says. 'It was the simple thing people do wh