Had someone crept up to the cottage with the sunken thatched roof that night, had they peered through the slits in the shutters,
they would have seen in the dimly lit interior a grey-bearded old man and an ashen-haired girl sitting by the fireplace.
They would have noticed that the two of them were staring silently into the glowing, ruby coals.
But no one could have seen it. For the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof was well hidden among the fog and the mist, in a boundless swamp in the Pereplut Marshes where no one dared to venture.