“Now you know,” said Catrina, when they reached the hut, “why I hate Petersburg.”

Maggie nodded.  The effect of the forest was still upon her.  She did not want to talk.

The woman who received them, the wife of a keeper, had prepared in a rough way for their reception.  She had a large fire and bowls of warm milk.  The doors and windows had been thrown wide open by Paul’s orders.  He wanted to spare Maggie too intimate an acquaintance with a Russian interior.  The hut was really a shooting-box built by Paul some years earlier, and inhabited by a head-keeper, one learned in the ways of bear and wolf and lynx.  The large dwelling-room had been carefully scrubbed.  There was a smell of pine-wood and soap.  The table, ready spread with a simple luncheon, took up nearly the whole of the room.

While the two girls were warming themselves, a keeper came to the door of the hut and asked to see Catrina.  He stood in the little door-way, completely filling it, and explained that he could not come in, as the buckles and straps of his snow-shoes were clogged and frozen.  He wore the long Norwegian snow-shoes, and was held to be the quickest runner in the country.

Catrina had a long conversation with the man, who stood hatless, ruddy, and shy.

“It is,” she then explained to Maggie, “Paul’s own man, who always loads for him and carries his spare gun.  He has sent him to tell us that the game has been ringed, and that the beaters will close in on a place called the Schapka Clearing, where there is a woodman’s refuge.  If we care to put on our snow-shoes, this man will guide us to the clearing and take care of us till the battue is over.”

Of course Maggie welcomed the proposal with delight, and after a hasty luncheon the three glided off through the forest as noiselessly as they had come.  After a tiring walk of an hour and more they came to the clearing, and were duly concealed in the hut.

No one, the keeper told the ladies, except Paul, knew of their presence in the little wooden house.  The arrangements of the beat had been slightly altered at the last moment after the hunters had separated.  The keeper lighted a small fire and shyly attended to the ladies, removing their snow-shoes with clumsy fingers.  He closed the door, and arranged a branch of larch across the window so that they could stand near it without being seen.

They had not been there long before De Chauxville appeared.  He moved quickly across the clearing, skimming over the snow with long, sweeping strides.  Two keepers followed him, and after having shown him the rough hiding-place prepared for him, silently withdrew to their places.  Soon Karl Steinmetz came from another direction, and took up his position rather nearer to the hut, in a thicket of pine and dwarf oak.  He was only twenty yards away from the refuge where the girls were concealed.