“Nap!” she exclaimed.  “I must go!  I must have been dreaming to forget the time!”

“Time!” laughed Nap.  “What is time?”

“It is something that I have to remember,” she said.  “Why, it must be nearly two o’clock!”

Nap glanced at the sun and made no comment.  Anne felt for and consulted her watch.  It was already three.

She looked up in amazement and dismay.  “I must go at once!”

“Don’t!” said Nap.  “I am sure your watch is wrong.”

“I must go at once,” she repeated firmly.  “It is long past the luncheon hour.  I had no idea we had been here so long.  You must go too.  Your chauffeur will think you are never coming.”

The skis were still on her feet.  Nap looked at her speculatively.

“This is rather an abrupt end,” he said.  “Won’t you have one more go?  A few minutes more or less can’t make any difference now.”

“They may make all the difference,” Anne said.  “Really, I ought not.”

They stood on a gentle slope that led downwards to the path she must take.

“Just ski down into the valley from here then,” urged Nap.  “It’s quicker than walking.  I won’t hold you this time.  You won’t fall.”

The suggestion was reasonable, and the fascination of the sport had taken firm hold of her.  Anne smiled and yielded.  She set her feet together and let herself go.

Almost at the same instant a sound that was like the bellow of an infuriated bull reached her from above.

She tried to turn, but the skis were already slipping over the snow.  To preserve her balance she was forced to go, and for seconds that seemed like hours she slid down the hillside, her heart thumping in her throat; her nerves straining and twitching to check that maddening progress.  For she knew that sound.  She had heard it before, had shrunk secretly many a time before its coarse brutality.  It was the yell of a man in headlong, furious wrath, an animal yell, unreasoning, hideously bestial; and she feared, feared horribly, what that yell might portend.

She reached the valley, and managed to swerve round without falling.  But for an instant she could not, she dared not, raise her eyes.  Clear on the frosty air came sounds that made her blood turn cold.  She felt as if her heart would suffocate her.  A brief blindness blotted out all things.

Then with an agonised effort she forced back her weakness, she forced herself to look.  Yes, the thing she had feared so horribly was being enacted like a ghastly nightmare above her.

There on the slope was her husband, a gigantic figure outlined against the snow.  He had not stopped to parley.  Those mad fits of passion always deprived him, at the outset, of the few reasoning powers that yet remained to him.  Without question or explanation of any kind he had flung himself upon the man he deemed his enemy, and Anne now beheld him, gripping him by the neck as a terrier grips a rat, and flogging him with the loaded crop he always carried to the hunt.