“Where’s your ring?” he asked.
“I’ve lost it,” she replied.
“You are my Anna, and yet you are not,” he exclaimed. “A stranger has taken possession of you.”
As he said these words, she looked at him with a side-long glance, and all at once he realised that her eyes were not human, but the blood-shot eyes of a bull; and then he understood.
“Begone, witch!” he cried, and breathed into her face.
If you could only have seen what happened now! The would-be Anna was immediately transformed, her face grew green and yellow like gall, and she burst with rage; at the next moment a black rabbit jumped over the bilberry bushes and disappeared in the wood.
Victor stood alone in the perplexing, bewildering forest, but he was not afraid. “I will go on,” he thought, “and if I should meet the devil himself, I will not be afraid; I shall say the Lord’s Prayer, and that will go a long way towards protecting me.”
He trudged on and presently he came to a cottage. He knocked; the door was opened by an old woman; he inquired whether he could stay the night. He could stay, if he liked, but the old dame had nothing to offer him but a small attic, which was only so so.
Victor did not mind what it was like, as long as it was a place where he could sleep.
When they were agreed about the price, he followed her upstairs to the attic. A huge wasp’s nest hung right over the bed, and the old dame began to make excuses for harbouring such guests.