Hexadecimal and bitwise operations

Maybe this is just my lack of experience with working with hex, but...

I was asked to produce an M-tree class using unsigned ints in hex to
traverse through and find nodes. The thing I'm having trouble working
out is, I was given (on paper) 25E1 & 0010 = 00E0, but when I tried it
on my computer, I found C++ converting it all to binary and producing
0x4 & 0x3 = 100 & 011 = 0.

Obviously, that's not helpful. How can I take my hex numbers and do
the & operation? Or maybe my question is wrong--how can I access the
n'th digit?

NOTE: This thread was created after about an hour or more of research.
Simply pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

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