But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred happiness. Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister could have wished him to be. The head of the poet swam in delight. He had never before been so proud and blest. He hung over his volume for hours; he could hardly get away from it. When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from its fascinations, he found himself drawn back again into its presence. He touched fondly its soft, satiny leaves as though they were the cheek of beauty; he pressed his own cheek against them; he committed all the follies which we understand and admire in the immemorial raptures of the young lover or the father of the first born. "They must see this," he cried aloud. "They can't overlook a volume like this." "They" being, of course, that public whose opinion he had always despised--those critics whose praise he had always declared to be the worst censure to a man of true genius. To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his breast for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That emotion came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager; but to be thus lifted to his longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and beautiful woman was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and seldom allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The emotion called up by experience was as new as the experience itself. Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of excitement he would probably, if need were, have laid down his life for Minola. If Minola knew what strange effect had been wrought in the breast of her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money well laid out, even although she had wanted it far more than she did. "To making a man happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar entry on which a famous essay in the "Spectator" was founded. To make a man grateful for the first time is surely a nobler piece of work than to make him merely happy, and it ought fairly to cost a good deal more. Minola had made a man for the first time both grateful and happy. The work was a little expensive in this case, but what miser will say that the money was thrown away?