have nothing to look forward to but work and privations. What am I to do if they get ill besides? I can do so little."
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.
