The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continued discussion elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he said that he had not been trying to account for it.

“Then you don’t care for Kitty’s pleasure at all, and you don’t want her to enjoy herself.  Why don’t you take some interest in the matter?”

“Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagara in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn’t add a soul to the floating population.  Under the circumstances I prefer to leave it unexplained.”

“Do you think it’s because it’s such a hot summer?  Do you suppose it’s not exactly the season?  Didn’t you expect there’d be more people?  Perhaps Niagara isn’t as fashionable as it used to be.”

“It looks something like that.”

“Well, what under the sun do you think is the reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps,” interposed Kitty, placidly, “most of the visitors go to the other hotel, now.”

“It ’s altogether likely,” said the other lady, eagerly.  “There are just such caprices.”

“Well,” said Richard, “I wanted you to go there.”

“But you said that you always heard this was the a most fashionable.”

“I know it.  I didn’t want to come here for that reason.  But fortune favors the brave.”

“Well, it’s too bad!  Here we’ve asked Kitty to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little peep into the world, and you’ve brought us to a hotel where we’re—­”

“Monarchs of all we survey,” suggested Kitty.

“Yes, and start at the sound of our own,” added the other lady, helplessly.

“Come now, Fanny,” said the gentleman, who was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker.  “You know you insisted, against all I could say or do, upon coming to this house; I implored you to go to the other, and now you blame me for bringing you here.”

“So I do.  If you’d let me have my own way without opposition about coming here, I dare my I should have gone to the other place.  But never mind.  Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope.  She ’s your cousin.”

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded in her lap.  She now rose and said that she did not know anything about the other hotel, and perhaps it was just as empty as this.

“It can’t be.  There can’t be two hotels so empty,” said Fanny.  “It don’t stand to reason.”

“If you wish Kitty to see the world so much,” said the gentleman, “why don’t you take her on to Quebec, with us?”

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless content about the parlor.

“I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she’s only come for the night, and has nothing with her but a few cuffs and collars!  I certainly never heard of anything so absurd before!”

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for, after a silence, “I could lend her some things,” she said musingly.  “But don’t speak of it to-night, please.  It’s too ridiculous.  Kitty!” she called out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, “How would you like to go to Quebec, with us?”