cessary precaution to call and ask permission to introduce his friend.
He was fortunate enough to find Minola not only willing, but even what
Mary might have thought, if she had considered the matter, suspiciously
willing, to receive Mr. Heron. In truth, Minola had in her mind a little
plot to do a service to Mary Blanchet and her brother in the matter of
the poems, and she had thought of Mr. Heron as the kindliest and
likeliest person she knew to give her a helping hand in the carrying out
of her project. Mary, not thinking anything of this, was yet made more
happy than before by the prospect of having a handsome young man for one
of the audience. As has been said already, she had the kindliest
feelings to handsome young men. Then the presence of another listener
would make the thing quite an assembly; almost, as she observed in
gentle ecstasy more than once to Minola, as if it were one of the poetic
contests of the middle ages, in which minstrels sang and peerless ladies
awarded the prize of song.

So she busied herself all the morning to adorn the rooms and make them
fit for the scene of a poet's triumph. She started away to Covent
Garden, and got pots of growing flowers and handfuls of "cut flowers,"
to scatter here and there. She had an old guitar which she disposed on
the sofa with a delightfully artistic carelessness, having tried it in
all manner of positions before she decided on the final one, in which
the forgetful hand of the musician was supposed to have heedlessly
dropped it. All the books in the prettiest bindings--especially
poems--she laid about in conspicuous places. Any articles of
apparel--bonnets, wraps, and such like, that might upon an ordinary
occasion have been seen on tables or chairs--were carefully stowed away
in their proper receptacles--except, indeed, for a bright-colored shawl,
which, thrown gracefully across an arm of the sofa, made, in conjunction
with the guitar, quite an artistic picture in itself. Near the guitar,
too, in a moment of sudden inspiration, she arranged a glove of
Nola's--a glove only once worn, and therefore for all pictorial effect
as good as new, while having still the pretty shape of the owner's hand
expressed in it. What can there be, Mary Blanchet thought, more winsome
to look at, more suggestive of all poetic thought, than the
carelessly-lying glove of a beautiful girl? But she took good care not
to consult the owner of the glove on any such point, dreading with go