Summary

A grandfather tells his 15-year-old granddaughter a story about the old days in "The Hunt."

In his story, Vassily meets a peddler in the forest and befriends her, catching a rabbit for her. He sees her a second day. To repay him for a rabbit, she gives him a trinket from her sack of treasures. She was going to read his fortune, but got scared of him and ran away, foreshadowing. The trinket is a cameo with a beautiful likeness of the duke's daughter on it. He becomes infatuated with her and that night runs away from his family hut to find the Duke's daughter.

During his travels, he runs across the gypsy woman again, lying dead with her sack of treasures still with her. This is a clue that robbery was not the motive of whomever or whatever killed...