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.

Nap was writhing to and fro like an eel, striving, she saw, to overthrow
his adversary. But the gigantic strength of madness was too great for
his lithe activity. By sheer weight he was borne down.

With an anguished cry Anne started to intervene. But two steps with the
skis flung her headlong upon the snow, and while she grovelled there,
struggling vainly to rise, she heard the awful blows above her like
pistol-shots through the stillness. Once she heard a curse, and once a
demonical laugh, and once, thrilling her through and through, spurring