The occupant of the room who thus welcomed Minola was a woman not far short probably of forty years of age. She was short, she was decidedly growing fat, she had a face which ought from its outlines and its color to be rather humorous and mirthful than otherwise, and a pair of very fine, deep, and consequently somewhat melancholy eyes. These eyes were the only beauty of Miss Mary Blanchet's face. She had not good sight, for all their brightness. When any one talked with her at some little distance across a room, or even across a broad table, he could easily see by the irresponsive look of the eyes--the eyes which never quite found a common focus with his even during the most animated interchange of thought--that Miss Blanchet had short sight. But Miss Blanchet always frankly and firmly declined to put on spectacles. "I have only my eyes to boast of, my dear," she said to all her female advisers, "and I am not going to cover them with ugly spectacles, you may be sure." Hers was a life of the simplest vanity, the most innocent affectation. Her eyes had driven her into poetry, love, and disappointment. She was understood to have loved very deeply and to have been deserted. None of her friends could quite remember the lover, but every one said that no doubt there must have been such a person. Miss Blanchet never actually spoke of him, but she somehow suggested his memory. Miss Blanchet was a poetess. She had published by subscription a volume of verses, which was favorably noticed in the local newspapers and of which she sent a copy to the Queen, whereof Her Majesty had been kindly pleased to accept. Thus the poetess became a celebrity and a sort of public character in Dukes-Keeton, and when her father died it was felt that the town ought to do something for one who had done so much for it. It made her custodian of the courthouse, entrusted with the charge of seeing that it was kept clean, ventilated, water-besprinkled; that when assizes came on, the judges' rooms were fittingly adorned and that bouquets of flowers were placed every morning on the bench on which they sat. This place Miss Blanchet had held for many years. The rising generation had forgotten all about her poetry, and indeed, as she seldom went out of her own little domain, had for the most part forgotten her existence.