She felt a sudden fear when she looked down at his face resting on her shoulder, with eyes closed, but the next moment he lifted his head and rose, saying:
“Thank you, Jenny dear.”
Gram put the drawings back in their cover and straightened the table.
“I hope you will be very, very happy. You are so bright and courageous, so energetic and gifted. Dear child, you are everything I wanted to be, but never was.” He spoke in a low, absent-minded voice.
“I think,” he said a moment later, “that when relations between two people are new, before their life is perfectly accorded, there are many small difficulties to overcome. I wish you could live elsewhere, not in this town. You should be alone, far from your own people—at first at least.”
“Helge has applied for a post in Bergen, as you know,” said Jenny, and the feeling of despair and anguish again seized her when she thought of him.
“Do you never speak to your mother about it? Why don’t you? Are you not fond of your mother?”
“Of course I am fond of her.”
“I should think it would be a good thing to talk to her about it—get her advice.”