All that night Martha hardly slept.  She could hardly believe that she was really going to escape from the old woman at last, and have a hut of her own, where there would be no one to scold her.  She wondered who the young man was.  She hoped he was Fedor Ivanovitch, who had such kind eyes, and such nimble fingers on the balalaika, and such a merry way of flinging out his heels when he danced the Russian dance.  But although he always smiled at her when they met, she felt she hardly dared to hope that it was he.  Early in the morning she got up and said her prayers to God, put the whole hut in order, and packed her things into a little box.  That was easy, because she had such few things.  It was the other daughters who had new dresses.  Any old thing was good enough for Martha.  But she put on her best blue dress, and there she was, as pretty a little maid as ever walked under the birch trees in spring.

The old man harnessed the mare to the sledge and brought it to the door.  The snow was very deep and frozen hard, and the wind peeled the skin from his ears before he covered them with the flaps of his fur hat.

“Sit down at the table and have a bite before you go,” says the old woman.

The old man sat down, and his daughter with him, and drank a glass of tea and ate some black bread.  And the old woman put some cabbage soup, left from the day before, in a saucer, and said to Martha, “Eat this, my little pigeon, and get ready for the road.”  But when she said “my little pigeon,” she did not smile with her eyes, but only with her cruel mouth, and Martha was afraid.  The old woman whispered to the old man:  “I have a word for you, old fellow.  You will take Martha to her betrothed, and I’ll tell you the way.  You go straight along, and then take the road to the right into the forest ... you know ... straight to the big fir tree that stands on a hillock, and there you will give Martha to her betrothed and leave her.  He will be waiting for her, and his name is Frost.”

The old man stared, opened his mouth, and stopped eating.  The little maid, who had heard the last words, began to cry,

“Now, what are you whimpering about?” screamed the old woman.  “Frost is a rich bridegroom and a handsome one.  See how much he owns.  All the pines and firs are his, and the birch trees.  Any one would envy his possessions, and he himself is a very bogatir,[2] a man of strength and power.”

The old man trembled, and said nothing in reply.  And Martha went on crying quietly, though she tried to stop her tears.  The old man packed up what was left of the black bread, told Martha to put on her sheepskin coat, set her in the sledge and climbed in, and drove off along the white, frozen road.

The road was long and the country open, and the wind grew colder and colder, while the frozen snow blew up from under the hoofs of the mare and spattered the sledge with white patches.  The tale is soon told, but it takes time to happen, and the sledge was white all over long before they turned off into the forest.