Eve, who had already finished emptying her bag while I had been struggling, came over to help me. “Why, Sandy,” she said, “this can’t be the key, it’s too large.”

“Well, it’s the key I locked it with this morning,” I retorted impatiently. “My trunk key is flat and I haven’t any other.”

Eve shook her head puzzled. “You’d better look through your handbag anyway,” she said. “This simply can’t be the key.”

Just to satisfy her, I dumped the contents of my bag on the blue and white counterpane of the bed. There was the key to my trunk, half a bar of nut fudge wrapped in tin foil and bearing unmistakable evidences of having been sat on, my address book in which all the girls had written their summer addresses just last night, a vanity case, two rubber bands, a stub of a pencil, and a handkerchief. That was all.

“You see,” I said, “it’s just got to be the key. It can’t be anything else.”

“Then,” said Eve most surprisingly, “this isn’t your suitcase!”

“What!” I wheeled about and looked at the case on the chair. It was black and had once been shiny. It surely looked like mine, scratches and all. But wait—what was that gouge in the fabric near the hinge? I didn’t remember that.

Then Eve did a funny thing. She leant over and sniffed it. “Tobacco!” she exclaimed.

I went to sniff too; the odor was unmistakable. I took the case up and felt its weight again. “I remember thinking it was awfully heavy on the way from the station,” I mused. I was looking the case over more carefully now and the more I looked, the more unfamiliar it became. Could it be possible that Eve was right and that somehow or other I’d contrived to walk off with somebody else’s baggage? I could not understand it.

“But how could it have happened?” I cried. “I had it with me all the way on the train and in the station in Boston and on the bus after we left Berkshire Plains.”

Eve had dropped onto an old sea chest which stood under the window. She seemed to be thinking deeply. Finally her face lighted up. “I’ve got it!” she cried. “’Member that little, bow-legged man in the funny clothes who stopped the bus out in the country quite a while after we left Berkshire Plains? It wasn’t even at a crossroads and I said, ‘How convenient!’ or something.”

I nodded. I did remember the man. He had taken a seat just in 

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