Page:The Allies Fairy Book.djvu/158

 without saying a word, took his seat on it with his daughter, and drove back. They reached home, and the daughter fell at her stepmother’s feet. The old woman was thunderstruck when she saw the girl alive, and the new pelisse and and the basket of linen.

“Ah, you wretch!” she cries. “But you shan’t trick me!”

Well, a little later the old woman says to her husband:

“Take my daughters, too, to their bridegroom. The presents he’s made are nothing to what he’ll give them.”

Well, early next morning the old woman gave her girls their breakfast, dressed them as befitted brides, and sent them off on their journey. In the same way as before the old man left the girls under the pine.

There the girls sat, and kept laughing and saying:

“Whatever is mother thinking of? All of a sudden to marry both of us off! As if there were no lads in our village, forsooth! Some rubbishy fellow may come, and goodness knows who he may be!”

The girls were wrapped up in pelisses, but for all that they felt the cold.

“I say, Prascovia, the frost’s skinning me alive! Well, if our bridegroom doesn’t come quick, we shall be frozen to death here!”

“Don’t go talking nonsense, Mashka; as if suitors turned up in the forenoon! Why, it’s hardly dinner-time yet!”

“But I say, Prascovia, if only one comes, which of us will he take?”

“Not you, you stupid goose!”

“Then it will be you, I suppose!” “Of course it will be me!”

“You, indeed! There now, have done talking stuff and treating people like fools!”