The old man harnessed his horse and drove off. When he came to where his daughter was, he found she was alive and had got a good pelisse, a costly bridal veil, and a pannier with rich gifts. He stowed everything away on the sledge 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 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[281] doesn't come quick, we shall be frozen to death here!" "Don't go talking nonsense, Mashka; as if suitors[282] generally 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!" Meanwhile, Frost had numbed the girl's hands, so our damsels folded them under their dress, and then went on quarrelling as before. "What, you fright! you sleepy-face! you abominable shrew! why, you don't know so much as how to begin weaving: and as to going on with it, you haven't an idea!" "Aha, boaster! and what is it you know? Why, nothing at all except to go out to merry-makings and lick your lips there. We'll soon see which he'll take first!" While the girls went on scolding like that, they began to freeze in downright earnest. Suddenly they both cried out at once: "Whyever is he so long coming. Do you know, you've turned quite blue!" Now, a good way off, Frost had begun cracking, snapping his fingers, and leaping from fir to fir. To the girls it sounded as if some one was coming. "Listen, Prascovia! He's coming at last, and with bells, too!" "Get along with you! I won't listen; my skin is peeling with cold." "And yet you're still expecting to get married!" Then they began blowing on their fingers.