“Say what you think, my dear,” Mrs. Maturin would urge her.  “And remember that your own opinion is worth more than Shakespeare’s or Napoleon’s!”

Insall would escort her home to Mrs. Case’s boarding house....

One afternoon early in June Janet sat in her little room working at her letters when Brooks Insall came in.  “I don’t mean to intrude in business hours, but I wanted to ask if you would do a little copying for me,” he said, and he laid on her desk a parcel bound with characteristic neatness.

“Something you’ve written?” she exclaimed, blushing with pleasure and surprise.  He was actually confiding to her one of his manuscripts!

“Well—­yes,” he replied comically, eyeing her.

“I’ll be very careful with it.  I’ll do it right away.”

“There’s no particular hurry,” he assured her.  “The editor’s waited six months for it—­another month or so won’t matter.”

“Another month or so!” she ejaculated,—­but he was gone.  Of course she couldn’t have expected him to remain and talk about it; but this unexpected exhibition of shyness concerning his work—­so admired by the world’s choicer spirits—­thrilled yet amused her, and made her glow with a new understanding.  With eager fingers she undid the string and sat staring at the regular script without taking in, at first, the meaning of a single sentence.  It was a comparatively short sketch entitled “The Exile,” in which shining, winged truths and elusive beauties flitted continually against a dark-background of Puritan oppression; the story of one Basil Grelott, a dreamer of Milton’s day, Oxford nurtured, who, casting off the shackles of dogma and man-made decrees, sailed with his books to the New England wilderness across the sea.  There he lived, among the savages, in peace and freedom until the arrival of Winthrop and his devotees, to encounter persecution from those who themselves had fled from it.  The Lord’s Brethren, he averred, were worse than the Lord’s Bishops—­Blackstone’s phrase.  Janet, of course, had never heard of Blackstone, some of whose experiences Insall had evidently used.  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.