She turned over the sheets of the portfolio with the dreams of his youth; it was a melancholy business. He had told her about this work often when they were alone, and she understood that he thought he had been born an artist for the sake of this and nothing else. The pictures hanging in his home he called the amateur work of a conscientious and diligent pupil, but these—they were his own. They were illustrations to Landstad’s Folksongs. At first sight these big sheets with frames of Roman foliage and ornate black-letter writing were good enough. The colouring was pure and effective in most of them, in some really fine, but the figures in the vignettes and borders were without style and life, although the miniature drawings were correct in every detail. Some of them were naturalistic, others approaching Italian mediaeval art to such an extent that Jenny recognized certain Annunciation angels and madonnas in the cloaks of knights and maidens, and the leaves in gold and purple she remembered having seen, in a book of mass in the San Marco library. The words of the songs looked very strange, hand-printed in elegant monastic Latin types. In some of the larger full-page illustrations the composition was baroque, a direct copy of Roman altar pictures. It was an echo of all he had seen and lived among and loved—an echo of the melody of Gert Gram’s youth; not a single note was his own, but this melody of many notes was resounded in a particularly soft, melancholy tone. “You don’t quite like them,” he said. “I can see you don’t.” “Yes, I like them. There is much that is pretty and delicate about them, but, you know”—she searched for the right expression—“the effect is a little strange on us, who have seen the same subjects treated differently and so perfectly, that we cannot conceive them treated in another way.” He sat opposite her, resting his chin in his hand. By and by he looked up, and she was sad at heart to meet his eyes. “I seem to remember them as being much better than they are,” he said quietly, trying to smile. “I have not opened this portfolio for many a year, as I told you.” “I have never quite understood that you were so attracted by the later renaissance and the baroque,” she said, to divert the conversation.