Dance with the Devil

restaurant now, the snow still falling slowly but steadily, a new three inches of powdery stuff on the straight, narrow streets.
        “It isn't your fault,” she said. “There's no reason for you to be sorry. It's just that he has this obsession, this crazy need to make you look bad. His mother usually calms him down, but I don't think I should get into an argument with him. It's not my place, not in his own house. I almost had a fight with him this morning, and I don't want another near-argument.”
        “What was it about?”
        “I'll tell you in the Rover on the way out to the bottom of the Roxburgh ski slope. If you'll take me there, that is.”
        The Rover was parked by the grass in the center of the square. In five minutes, they had reached the bottom of the slope, and she had been able to complete the story of the post-midnight intruder who had painted the Satanic symbols on her door.
        “I don't think you should go back up there,” Michael said, holding her hand as they stood by the pylon where her skis were racked.
        “What else can I do?”
        “I'd see about getting you someplace to stay here tonight.”
        “But I work up there.”
        He was silent a moment, looking up the dark ski run. “I suppose that's reason enough to go back. But do you have to go this way, up that damned run in the middle of the night?”
        “It isn't the middle of the night,” she said. “It's just dark. And if I want to get there in time for supper, I'd better get going now.”
        She sat down and put on her skis, then stood up and grabbed her poles, flipped the switch that started the ski-lift cables moving.
        “You aren't frightened of the dark, going up there through the trees at night?” he asked, making one last effort to dissuade her.
        “Not at all,” she said. And she realized that, though she had not completely regained her normal mood of optimism, the few hours with Michael's friends had alleviated the worst of the gloom that had settled over her after the previous night's activities. She truly was not frightened.
        He slid her to the cable, her skis making a shishing noise in the new snow, and kissed her before she started upwards. It was a languorous kiss that seemed to last forever. “Be careful,” he said. Then he stepped back as she grasped the steel line and was whisked up the gentle bottom slopes.
        Though the pines seemed to close in on her now and then, as if they were alive and seeking her, she did not lose the moderately rosy glow which his kiss had left with her, and she reached the top of the run fifteen minutes later, weary but safe.
        She had just enough time to change, brush her hair and freshen her makeup, arriving in the small dining room only five minutes late for dinner. The conversation was pleasant, lighter than usual, especially since Alex seemed happy to let everything remain trivial. He did not once mention Michael Harrison. Indeed, the only sour note in the evening was when Lydia said the locksmith would not be in for a few days.
        “But surely-” Katherine began.
        “He doesn't live in Roxburgh,” Alex explained. For some reason or other, she thought that his dark eyes were watching her more intently than usual. If he didn't have that air of brooding anger about him, she thought, he would be decidedly attractive-overwhelmingly attractive in fact. “He's a carpenter who works on locks as a sideline, lives about fifteen miles away in another village. If it weren't for this snow, he'd have come. But it has been coming down steadily -and now the radio weather reports call for a greater accumulation than we got a few days ago.”
        “I see.”
        “Don't worry,” Lydia said. “No one's going to come around bothering us in the middle of a blizzard. The winds are supposed to intensify tonight. It's going to be a real mess. I love it, all of it.” She went on to describe some of the record storms of her childhood and enchanted them with a number of anecdotes about life in the mountains before the advent of the auto and the snowplow.
        Katherine went to bed early, without seeing Yuri, and was asleep by eleven, exhausted from the skiing, the conversation with Michael's friends in the cafe, the ride up the slope in the cold and wind, the long and delightful chatter over dinner and, later, over cordials in the main drawing room.
        The day seemed to have slipped past as if