No, I do not know by what accident it was that Edward Ross came to spend a week in August at the Columbia Hotel, at Hermon Springs. No, and I do not know by what accident it was that all the Verneys were there. The home of the Verneys is at Painted Post, as I suppose you know. But this year the Verneys took a holiday for a month at the Columbia Hotel, and while they were away from home the ceilings were whitened, the house was painted inside and out, and new railings were added to the outside steps at the side door. What I do know is that it was at the Columbia Hotel that Edward Ross first saw Psyche, who was the youngest daughter of the Verney household. All the world of the Columbia Hotel had gone across to the Solferino House, which was the other side of the way. There was a hop at the Solferino House, and the general public had gone to the hop. Ross had arrived late, the only passenger by that little one-horse railway from Hudson. He came into the great drawing-room, and thought he was alone. But he was not alone. Psyche, youngest of the Verney girls, was at the piano, not playing, but looking over some music which the Jeffrey girls had left there. If you had asked the gossips of the hotel why Psyche did not go to the hop where all her older sisters had gone, you would have been told that she was but the half-sister of the other Verneys; that since her mother died, these three older sisters had held a hard rein on poor Psyche; that some one of them had laid down the law that there were so many of them they must not all go together to any frolic. In the interpretation of this law, Psyche always stayed at home if the party were pleasant, and one or two of the older sisters stayed if it were likely to be stupid. This is what the gossips of the hotel would have said, and this is what I believe. Anyway, it happened that on this particular evening Edward Ross threw himself at length on a long sofa in the drawing-room, not knowing that any one was there; and little Psyche, not knowing that he had come in, crooned over the Jeffreys' music, and at last picked out something from Mercadante which she had never seen before, and which did not seem to her very difficult, and, after she had read the whole page down, tried it, and tried it again, in her resolute, wide-awake, very satisfactory way.