Dance with the Devil

good at disguising an I-told-you-so self-righteousness Lydia had the good taste to ignore but which drew Alex's ire in short order.
        The afternoon had been spent in making preliminary plans to catch the Satanists in their work if they dared be so bold about it again. Lydia pledged a substantial sum to the town treasury for the maintenance of a larger parttime deputy force to keep the streets and buildings of the town under constant observation during the night hours.
        Michael Harrison, who was sitting beside Katherine in the conference room of the town hall, leaned toward her and whispered, “They made fun of all this until it touched something of theirs.”
        Though Michael had been quiet, Alex heard him and challenged him on the point. The disagreement soon became a full-fledged argument-though the greatest part of the shouting and gesticulating was on Alex's side. Michael answered calmly, rationally, though sometimes a bit bitterly, only to further infuriate Alex by his reserved manner. At one point, Alex struck him as a challenge to a fight and had to be restrained by the constable who was clearly enjoying the confrontation.
        After that, the meeting broke up, and Katherine rode back to Owlsden with the Bolands. Lydia attempted to relax everyone with gay observations on the weather and the efficiency of the plows but had to give up long before they reached the tall oak doors of the ancestral house. Alex, in a brooding mood, did not say anything at all.
        At dinner, Alex had begun a rambling monologue whose subject was almost exclusively Michael Harrison, opening a vein of anger, dislike and bitterness that was unpleasant to behold. Too, he put forth the opinion that Harrison himself might very well be behind these recent Satanic ceremonies and felt-in some way that Katherine could not comprehend-that Harrison was doing this only as a means to get to the Roxburgh-Boland family and embarrass them.
        When his mother asked him please to cease that line of conversation, he challenged her on her defense of Harrison and left the table in a huff after upsetting his water glass and breaking the tiny, fragile wine taster beside it.
        Lydia apologized for Alex when he was gone and tried to pass off his maniac behavior as nothing more than a case of bad nerves. However, even she did not seem to believe that it was as simple as that, and she excused herself for the remainder of the evening as soon as dessert had been served.
        Now, alone in her room, Katherine, considering the drawbacks to life in Roxburgh and Owlsden, began to make a mental list of debits that she had been willing to ignore until the events of the afternoon. First of all, there was this whole cult business, this sacrificing of animals and playing at devil worship. She now saw that it was far more serious than she had at first thought. As Michael said the first time they had talked about it, though Satanism was silly and unbelievable, the adherents of such an odd faith might very well be dangerously mentally unbalanced. And since they held some ceremonies in the forest behind Owlsden, perhaps one was not safe alone, at night, as Yuri had protested-though the danger lay in mortal agents, not in supernatural stalkers. Secondly, she thought she would not be able to abide Alex Boland's increasingly unpleasant temperament for long without telling him exactly what she thought of his childish outbursts. He seemed to get depressed too quickly, to react too suddenly to even the slightest irritant. And what was this obsession with Michael Harrison all about? At times, Alex was downright slanderous when he talked of Mike… Thirdly, there was the townspeople's underlying envy of the Roxburgh-Boland family which she had not noticed until this afternoon when the constable and various other town officials got such a kick out of proving that Lydia and Alex were wrong on the question of the Satanists. Katherine supposed that all wealthy people were subjected to this kind of attitude now and again, but, even so, she felt that it proved the existence of a minor streak of hypocrisy in what was reputedly a happy town. Fourthly, there was Alex's treatment of his mother which, at dinner this evening, had ceased to be exemplary and became inexcusably rude. His use of a few four-letter words at the table had visibly shaken his mother, and his overall temper had thoroughly blighted the evening. If this continued, Katherine could