“There’s sun here all the morning. When one bed’s moved out, the room will look bigger; and the stove is all right. The price is forty lire without light and fire, and two for _servizio_. It is cheap. Shall I say you take it? You can move in tomorrow, if you like.” “Don’t thank me. I just loved to help you,” she said, as they walked down the stairs. “I hope you will like it. Signora Papi is very clean, I know.” “It is not a common virtue here, I suppose?” “No, indeed. But I don’t think the people who let rooms in Christiania are much better. My sister and I lived once in rooms in Holbergsgate and I had a pair of patent leather shoes under the bed, but I never dared to take them out. Sometimes I peeped at them under the bed; they looked like two little white woolly lambs.” “I have no experience in that way. I have always lived at home.” Francesca burst out laughing all of a sudden. “The signora thought I was your _moglie_, do you know, and that we were going to live there together. I said I was your cousin, but she did not catch on. _Cugina_—it is not an accepted relationship anywhere in the world, it seems.” Both laughed. “Would you care to go for a walk?” asked Miss Jahrman suddenly. “Shall we go to Ponte Molle? Have you been there? Is it too far? We can come back by tram.” “Is it not too far for _you_? You’re not well.” “It does me good to walk. ‘You must walk more,’ says Gunnar always—Mr. Heggen, you know.” She chatted all the time, looking at him now and again to see if he was amused. They took the new road along by the Tiber; the yellow-grey river rolled between the green slopes. Small, pearl-tinted clouds sailed over the dark shrubbery of Monte Mario and the blocks of villas between the evergreen trees. Francesca nodded to a policeman and said laughingly to Gram: “Do you know, that man has proposed to me. I used to walk here very often alone, and sometimes I spoke to him, and one day he proposed. The son of our tobacconist has also proposed to me. Jenny says it was my own fault, and I suppose it was.” “Miss Winge seems to scold you very often. She is a strict mamma, I can see.” “No, she isn’t. She only scolds me when I need scolding: I wish somebody had done it long before.” She sighed. “But nobody ever did.” Helge Gram felt quite free and easy in her company. There was something very soft about her—her lissom gait, her voice, and her face under the big mushroom hat. He did not quite like Jenny Winge when he thought of her now; she had such determined grey eyes and such an enormous appetite. Cesca had just told him that she herself could hardly eat anything at present. “Miss Winge is a very determined young lady, I should think,” he said.