"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.
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?"