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morning?’
    â€˜Without ceasing,’ replied Hugo. ‘It’s very nearly perpetual motion. Still, it provides the bystanders with a lot of good, clean fun, and if his rugged bulldog spirit forbids him to chuck the whole idea and take up ballroom dancing instead, he will undoubtedly succeed in breaking his neck in the near future, ruining a perfectly good pair of skis in process. Then we can all have a jolly laugh and you can put the nursery slopes out of bounds.’
    â€˜Considering Mrs Matthews is being buried today, I don’t think that’s a particularly funny remark,’ observed Reggie Craddock frostily.
    â€˜Oh God!’ said Hugo. ‘“We are not amused!” Sorry, sorry, sorry. Lead me lunchwards, Fudge, before I put my foot in it further. Coming, Sarah?’
    The rest of the day passed without incident, and watching Janet Rushton at supper that evening Sarah decided that she was either a remarkably good actress, or had allowed the shock of finding Mrs Matthews’ body to exaggerate her fears.
    That night there were no unusual sounds from the other side of the thin wooden wall of her bedroom; but Sarah found herself unable to sleep, for the deathly silence of the previous night was broken now by a soft chorus of drips from the thawing snow on the roof falling with a stealthy, monotonous patter into the piled snowdrifts below the verandah rail, pitting them with small, dark, ice-fringed holes. There was a breeze too: a faint uneasy breath of wind that sighed and whispered along the dark verandahs and under the snow-laden eaves, and combed through the black deodar forests behind the hotel with a sound like far-off surf.
    An hour or two after midnight it died away and frost drew a silent finger along the rooftops; checking the thaw and re-hanging fantastic fringes of icicles from every gutter and ledge. Silence flowed back across the marg, and Sarah slept at last. To be awakened by a discreet tap upon the door and the arrival of her morning tea.
    Bulaki, her down-country bearer, reported that it had snowed in the early hours of the morning and that the hotel’s Kashmiri servants said that bad weather was coming. He looked cold and unhappy, and his dark face appeared blue and pinched and as woeful as a monkey’s. He inquired between chattering teeth if it was still the Miss-sahib’s intention to spend the next night in the Khilanmarg ski-hut, and on receiving a confirmatory answer observed darkly that no good would come of it.
    The ski-hut, said Bulaki, was damp and insecure. It was also a place of evil omen, for had not the first ski-hut been buried by an avalanche—and with no less than three young sahibs within it at the time? He himself had spoken with a man who had helped to dig out the bodies of those same sahibs, and … At which point Sarah had cut him short with some haste, and having repeated her intention to spend the night in the Khilanmarg hut, requested him to pack what she would need for the expedition while she was at breakfast.
    Twenty minutes later she stepped out into the snow-powdered verandah and descended the hill to the dining-room, which was situated in a large block some distance below the wing in which she slept. The hotel buildings lay scattered over the top and sides of a steep little hill that rises out of the centre of the shallow bowl in the mountains that is Gulmarg—the ‘Meadow of Roses’. A bowl that in summer is one vast, green golf-course, walled about by forests of pine and deodar and chestnut, and dotted and encircled by innumerable little log huts that bear a strong resemblance to those of a mining camp in any Cowboy film.
    Despite Bulaki’s warnings of bad weather it was a glorious morning. The sun had not yet reached into the bowl of Gulmarg, but it lit up the mountain tops that rose above it and glittered upon Sunrise Peak in a dazzle of light. Breakfast was a hurried meal, and immediately after it