.
And the Puritans dealt with Grelott even as they 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 s