y would have served the author of
"Paradise Lost" himself, especially if he had voiced among them the
opinions set forth in his pamphlet on divorce. A portrait of a stern
divine with his infallible Book gave Janet a vivid conception of the
character of her ancestors; and early Boston, with yellow candlelight
gleaming from the lantern-like windows of the wooden, Elizabethan houses,
was unforgettably etched. There was an inquisition in a freezing barn of
a church, and Basil Grelott banished to perish amid the forest in his
renewed quest for freedom.... After reading the manuscript, Janet sat
typewriting into the night, taking it home with her and placing it
besides her bed, lest it be lost to posterity. By five the next evening
she had finished the copy.

A gentle rain had fallen during the day, but had ceased as she made her
way toward Insall's house. The place was familiar now: she had been there
to supper with Mrs. Maturin, a supper cooked and served by Martha Vesey,
an elderly, efficient and appallingly neat widow, whom Insall had
discovered somewhere in his travels and installed as his housekeeper.
Janet paused with her hand on the gate latch to gaze around her, at the
picket fence on which he had been working when she had walked hither the
year before. It was primly painted now, its posts crowned with the carved
pineapples; behind the fence old-fashioned flowers were in bloom, lupins
and false indigo; and the retaining wall of blue-grey slaty stone, which
he had laid that spring, was finished. A wind stirred the maple,
releasing a shower of heavy drops, and she opened the gate and went up
the path and knocked at the door. There was no response--even Martha must
be absent, in the village! Janet was disappointed, she had looked forward
to seeing him, to telling him how great had been her pleasure in the
story he had written, at the same time doubting her courage to do so. She
had never been able to speak to him about his work and what did her
opinion matter to him? As she turned away the stillness was broken by a
humming sound gradually rising to a crescendo, so she ventured slowly
around the house and into the orchard of gnarled apple trees on the slope
until she came insight of a little white building beside the brook. The
weathervane perched on the gable, and veering in the wet breeze, seemed
like a live fish swimming in its own element; and through the open window
she saw Insall bending over a lathe, from which the