"What is the matter?" he asked, when they walked down the stairs. "Has there been a scene again?"
"No, not at all," she replied, in a short, irritated voice. "I suppose your mother did not like my coming home with your father."
"It seems to me, too, that you need not have done it," said Helge humbly.
"I am going home by tram." Overwrought, and unable to control herself, she pulled her arm out of his. "I cannot stand any more tonight, and I will not have these scenes with you every time I have been to your home. Good-night."
"Jenny! Wait! Jenny!…" He hurried after her, but she was already at the stop when the tram came, and got in, leaving him without a word.
Jenny walked listlessly about in her studio next morning and could not settle down to anything. The pouring rain was beating against the big window. She stopped to look at the wet tiles of the roofs, the black chimneys, and the telephone wires, along which the small raindrops were rolling down like pearls until they gathered into one large one and fell off, to be replaced immediately by others.
She might go to her mother and the children in the country for a few days. She must go away from all this. Or she might go to an hotel in some other town and write for Helge to come and talk things over with her quietly. If they could only be together again—they two alone! She tried to think of their spring in Rome, of the silvery haze over the mountains, and of her own happiness in it all. But she could not reconstruct the picture of Helge from that time—as he had appeared to her enamoured eyes.
Those days seemed already so far away; they were an isolated
