“Michelle, let’s wait,” she said with dogged resolution. “I must see what happens.”
Michelle was staring toward the door, lost in thought. “It is a rendezvous,” she said at last. “If we could only hear them.”
The small, leaded windows of the lodge had red curtains drawn across them, behind which the candle-light softly shone. “If we could creep up and listen,” Lucy suggested, now in one of her rare moods of daring, when fear or anger got the better of prudence, “they couldn’t see us.”
“Very well,” Michelle agreed, after a moment’s hesitation.
“After all, they dare not hurt us, even if we are discovered,” said Lucy, abandoning the fir-tree’s shelter.
They crept up to the lodge and crouched in the snow beneath the nearest window. Voices sounded within, like two men arguing together, then Herr Johann, or so Lucy guessed, spoke alone, as though giving orders. Cries of “Ja! Ja!” filled the pause after he finished speaking. Chairs were pushed back, and the two girls started up to flee into the shadows, but the noise of a table dragged over the floor and of chairs pulled up to it told them that some sort of inspection or consultation had commenced. The mellow light shone a little brighter, as though a second candle had been lighted, and Herr Johann began talking again.
Lucy could not hear what he said, and, as she strained her ears, almost unconsciously she raised herself close beside the window, leaning her shoulder against the rough logs of the frame. Herr Johann spoke fast and steadily. For all her efforts Lucy could make out no more than disjointed words:
“Here you are. Look well. Ten miles. For you, Ludwig.”
Then to a question put by another voice he responded, “That’s it. Day after to-morrow.”
Lucy dropped to the snow again to ask of Michelle, listening with equal intentness at the other side of the casement, “Can you understand them?”