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.
She had been back twelve days and had not yet been to see his parents; when he asked her a third time if she had been, she made up her mind to go next day. The weather had changed in the night; a strong north wind was blowing, the sun shone with a sharp light, and clouds of dust were whirling in the streets. Then came a hail-storm so violent that she had to take refuge in a doorway. The hard white grains rebounded from the pavement on to her shoes and frivolous summer stockings. Next moment the sun came out again.
The Grams lived in Welhavensgate. At the corner Jenny stopped for a moment to look about; the two rows of grey houses
