omewhat awkward and rueful. Mr.
Heron explained that, by her express instructions, he had allowed
Blanchet to have it all his own way in the arrangement of the style of
his appearance in paper and print; and that the cost had become
something far greater than he had anticipated.

"You should never have been troubled about this," Victor went on to
say, "but that you made me promise that you alone should pay for this
thing; I wish I hadn't made any such promise, or consented that
Blanchet should have his way in the business. To think of a grown man,
who has seen the world, leaving a matter of money and business in the
hands of a girl and a poet! Blanchet has been going it."

Minola in all her trouble found room for wonder, delight, and something
like alarm in looking at the superb edition in which the poems of Mr.
Blanchet were to go before a world scarcely prepared for so much
artistic gorgeousness. All that vellum paper, rare typography, costly
and fantastic binding, and lavish illustration could do for poetry, had
been done without stint on behalf of Herbert Blanchet. The leaves were
as thick as parchment and as soft as satin. Only a very few lines of
verse appeared on each broad luxurious page. Every initial letter of a
sentence was a fantastic design. The whole school of Blanchet's
artistic friends had rushed into combination to enrich the pages, the
margins, and the covers, with fanciful illustration. If they only had
been great, or even successful and popular artists, the book might have
been worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately Mr. Blanchet's artistic
friends were not yet great or famous. The outer world--the world which,
in the opinion of the school, was wholly composed of dullards and
Philistines--knew as yet nothing about these artists, and neither
blamed them nor praised them. The volume was as large in its
superficial extent as an ordinary atlas, and some of the poems which
occupied a whole page were not more than four lines in length. The
whole thing seemed truly, in the words of a poet whom Mr. Blanchet
especially despised, "all a wonder and a wild desire."

Thinking of herself as the patroness and in some sort the parent of
such a volume, Minola felt some such mixture of pride and timidity as a
modest girl might own who has suddenly been made a princess, and is not
quite certain whether she will be able to support her position with
becoming nerve and dignity.

There came a little letter too from the