The two old people did not attempt to dissuade him; let him go, they thought; let him take his sorrow there and bury it; perchance he will be lighter of heart when he has wept himself out there.
In the ice-bound season the young man set out, and from the description which Teresa gave him, he recognized the funereal pine-grove which John Karpathy had had planted round the family vault, in order that there it might be green when everything else was white and dead.
He quitted the sledge, and cut across the plain, while the driver returned to the wayside _csarda_.
Meanwhile a pair of horsemen might have been seen slowly approaching from the opposite direction.

One of them was a little in the rear of the other, and led four hardy hounds in a long leash.
"I see the trail of a fox, Martin," said the foremost horseman, calling the attention of the one behind to the trail.

"We can easily track him through the fresh snow if we look sharp, and can catch him up before we reach Karpatfalva." The groom appeared to confirm his master's assertion.
"Follow the trail as straight as you can, and hand over two of the hounds to me while I make a circuit of the wood yonder." With that he took over two of the dogs, and sending his escort on in front, turned aside, slowly wading through the snow.

But the moment his man was out of sight, he suddenly changed his direction, and strode rapidly towards the pine grove.
On reaching the trench which surrounded it, he dismounted, tied his horse to a bush and the dogs to his saddle bow and waded across the narrow ditch.

By the light of the snow it was easy to find his goal.
A large white marble monument arose by the side of a green tree, on the top of it was the sad emblem of death, an angel with an inverted torch.
The horseman stood alone before the monument--this visitor was Rudolf.
Thus both of them had come at the same time, and it was the will of Fate that they should meet there before the tomb.
Rudolf hastened confidently towards the white colonnaded monument and stood rooted to the ground with amazement on perceiving the figure of a man, apparently in a state of collapse, half sitting, half kneeling on the pedestal.