I was soon out of breath. I seemed to have done nothing since yesterday but run and climb and feel frightened. Everything was going wrong. Why was it so difficult to keep two little girls hidden for a day or so? But I had to keep trying—there was no choice in the matter. If only I could find Max before he found the girls, I might be able to enlist his help….

I did. I found him around the very next corner in the road. But someone else had found him too: a young woman, dressed as a lady’s maid, with a smart coat of brown worsted and a neat little fur-trimmed hood….And they were making the most of this chance meeting, if that’s what it was, because their arms were around each other and they were kissing as if it had just been invented and they’d been asked to try it out. I stopped still, in despair; what could I do now? I couldn’t interrupt, could I? I wouldn’t be welcomed, that was plain; but what else could I do?

I sat down beside a tree, on a dry stone that stuck up out of the snow, and waited for them to notice me.

“Oh, Maxie,” said the girl, at last.

“Oh, Eliza! Fancy running into you like this! Where’s your mistress?”

“They arrested her, Maxie! I didn’t know what to do! They were inspecting papers or something, and she didn’t have the right sort, and the fat sergeant sent a little skinny constable out to escort her to the parish boundary—but she went tearing off so fast, dragging him along behind her, that I couldn’t follow them!”

So her mistress must be…the girls’ old teacher! So she’d be bound to listen! Or—would she? As a teacher, wouldn’t she think that anything to do with the Demon Huntsman was that dreaded thing, Imagination? Wouldn’t she think that the best place for the girls was back in the castle, under the care of Count Karlstein? And so—hadn’t I better not tell this Eliza about it all? Oh, I didn’t know what to do!

“You’ve still got your trombone, Maxie?” she said fondly.

“It ain’t a trombone, Eliza, it’s a coach-horn,” he said proudly.

“And your lovely coach, Max! Have you still got it? Is that how you came here?”

“No, me love; I had an accident in Geneva. It was all because of a plate of sausages….” They strolled off slowly, arm in arm. I followed them; I couldn’t help it.

“A plate of sausages?” said Eliza.