Jenny bent over her mother and kissed the tears from her pretty, childish eyes. The longing to give and to receive tenderness, the remembrance of her early childhood, and the consciousness that her mother did not know her life—its sorrows before and its happiness now—melted into a feeling of protecting love, and she gathered her mother into her arms. “Don’t cry, mother dear. Everything will come all right. I am going to stay at home for the present, and we have still something left of Aunt Katherine’s money.” “No, Jenny, you must keep that for yourself. I understand now that you must not be hampered in any way in your work. It was such a joy to us all when your picture at the exhibition was sold last autumn.” Jenny smiled. The fact that she had sold a picture and had two or three lines in the papers about it made her people look upon her work in quite a different light. “Don’t worry about me, mother. It is all right. I may be able to earn something while I am here. I must have a studio, though,” she said, after a pause, adding as an explanation: “I must finish my pictures in a studio, you see.” “But you will live at home, won’t you?” asked the mother anxiously. Jenny did not answer. “It won’t do, my dear child, for a young girl to live alone in a studio.” “Very well,” said Jenny; “I shall live at home.” When she was alone she took out Helge’s photo and sat down to write to him. She had been home only a couple of hours, and yet everything she had lived through out there, where he was, seemed so far away and altogether apart from her life here, before or now. The letter was one single cry of yearning. II Jenny had hired a studio and was arranging it to her taste. Kalfatrus came in the afternoons and helped her. “You have grown so tall that I almost thought I could not call you by the old name any longer.” The boy laughed. Jenny asked about all his doings while she had been away, and Nils told her of the extraordinary adventures he and two boy friends had had while they lived for some weeks in the log huts in Nordmarken. As she listened, it crossed her mind that her trips up there with him were now things of the past. She went in the mornings to the outskirts of the city—to walk by herself in the sunshine. The fields lay yellow with dead grass, there was still snow under the pines, but tiny buds were coming out on the foliage trees and from underneath the dead leaves peeped downy shoots of the blue anemone. She read Helge’s letters again and again; she carried them about her wherever she went. She longed for him impatiently, madly—longed to see him and touch him and convince herself that he was hers.