Michael went over to the mantelpiece, where, next to the wedding picture, there was a photograph of Norma Ellsworth, now Cully, with two small children on skis. She had not been a pretty girl, pale and skinny, and age had not made her any prettier. She stared out of the photograph, an uncertain small smile on her lips. The two boys seemed robust and took after their father. Luckily, Michael thought.

Ellsworth came back into the living room with an open bottle and a glass and poured for Michael. "You don't mind if it's not Austrian?"

"Not a bit." He tasted it. "Not bad."

"New York State," Ellsworth said.

Minna Ellsworth bustled into the living room, a plump, hearty, motherly woman in an apron, flushed from the heat in the kitchen.

"Mike," she said, emotionally. She embraced him and kissed his cheek, her arms solid and strong around him. Too bad, Michael thought, the daughter hadn't taken after either of her parents. She stepped back and examined him critically. "It's been too damn long."

"You're absolutely right, Minna," Michael said. "The place is as beautiful as ever. And so are you."

"Still a liar with the ladies, aren't you, Mike?" she said indulgently. She looked around the living room, though. "It's not too bad. Though everything's turning into an antique. Including the television set and me." She laughed, a rumbling, deep laugh. "Well, we can continue at the table. Dinner's ready." She went back to the kitchen, her wide bottom firm and strong under the sensible dark wool skirt.

"She looks great, Herb," Michael said to Ellsworth.

"Put on a little weight," Ellsworth said. "She enjoys her own cooking. Let's sit down."

They went into the dining room. There were only three places set on the big heavy oak table.

"Just the three of us?" Michael asked.

"Just us."

"I thought you said Norma was . . ."

"She said she couldn't come tonight," Ellsworth said, without expression.

They were silent for a moment. Michael finished his glass of wine and put it down on the sideboard. "You told her I was coming," he said, making it a declarative sentence.

"Uhuh."

"I see."

"Women," said Ellsworth. "Let's sit down."

"I saw the picture of her on the mantelpiece, with the two kids on skis," Michael said.

"Good kids."

"Did Norma keep up with her skiing?"

Ellsworth shook his head. "That was another of her disappointments. Just when it looked as though she was going to go on the circuit she tore her knee apart. Now she skis with her kids and that's all."

"Is she happy?"

"She would have been happier, if she'd gotten out of town and made a life for herself somewhere else. I never thought just being a housewife would be enough for her. However-" He shrugged his massive shoulders. "She made her decision. What's past is past."

Minna Ellsworth came in with a platter on which a big roast beef steamed, surrounded by browned potatoes. Tacitly, the two men didn't speak about Norma anymore during the meal.

After dinner, they watched television. There was a professional football game on and the two men watched intently while Minna did some sewing in a rocking chair, looking up occasionally, when the roar of the crowd became louder.

"They sure are wonderful," Ellsworth said. "But I'm glad I'm not playing these days." He had played in high school, but had not gone to college as he had to go to work and then into the Army right after graduation. "It's not a game anymore. It's men fighting for their lives for money."

"We all ought to be ashamed we watch it," Minna said unexpectedly. "Grown men tearing each other apart, their whole futures depending on whether they catch a ball or break their necks. And in skiing, the difference between being rich and famous or poor and a failure is a couple of hundredths of a second. There's enough competition in this world without burdening children with that kind of strain. And what it does to them later ... It makes you want to cry. Just about every kid in this town who got a picture in the paper because he or she could slide down a hill faster than the other kids has turned out the worse for it. I tell you, I thanked Almighty God when Norma broke her knee."

Ellsworth turned the television off. "Minna," he said crossly, "can't you let us enjoy ourselves for a few minutes?"

She got up out of the rocking chair. "Women're supposed to be a civilizing influence. I'm going to bed. If you want you can turn on that damn tube after I leave, if you keep the noise down." She went over to Michael and kissed his forehead. "Goodnight," she said. "Don't forget where we live, now."

"I won't," said Michael.

She went out and Ellsworth reached toward the television set, then thought better of it and let his arm drop. "The hell with it," he said. "We can find out who won in the papers tomorrow. Want a whiskey?"

"No, thanks."

"Good. Neither do I," Ellsworth said. "They fix you up all right at the hotel?"

"Couldn't be better. Tell me, how come an Austrian couple run a hotel in a place like Green Hollow?"

"The way I got it," Ellsworth said, "Heggener's family were rich and owned a fancy hotel in Vienna, but the old man didn't like Hitler and saw the handwriting on the wall and got the family over here before the Anschluss. Heggener must have been ten or eleven, maybe a little older, at the time. They got their money out in time, so they were loaded. The old man put together a string of small hotels in America and Heggener inherited. Did damn well on his own after his father died, too, from all appearances. Met the lady at a reception at the Austrian embassy to the U.N. and reverted to type. She must be at least twenty years younger than Heggener, but it's better than working, I guess."

"What's he in the hospital for?"

"Poor bastard," Ellsworth said. "He came down with tuberculosis. One of those new strains that they can't cure with penicillin. We'll miss him when he's gone," Ellsworth said sadly. "He's very popular in town."

"And she isn't?"

"She doesn't go out of her way to win any popularity contests." Ellsworth yawned.

Michael stood up. "I'd better be going," he said. "It's been a full day. Anyway, thanks to you, I'm not sleeping in the slammer tonight."

Ellsworth chuckled as he walked Michael to the door. He looked up at the sky and sniffed. "Looks like we're going to have snow. Not a day too soon. Sleep well, Mike."

When Michael entered the hotel he saw the nightclerk sleeping with his arms folded on the desk and his head on his arms. Quietly Michael went behind the desk and lifted his key off the hook.

There was a fire going in the fireplace in his room and an opened bottle of wine was in a cooler with two glasses on the table between the two easy chairs. He wondered whom Rita thought he was going to bring back with him for the second glass. He threw off his coat and jacket and put another log on the fire, poured a glass of wine for himself, sat down and leaned back luxuriously, sipping the cold wine, staring into the flames. Snow tomorrow, Ellsworth had predicted. If there was enough coming down between now and morning to make it worthwhile that would make everything perfect. He'd heard that there were some new steep trails cut through the forest and he wanted to explore them.

There was a knock on the door. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. Puzzled, he went to the door and opened it. Mrs. Heggener was standing, still dressed in the long, loosely flowing black gown.

"Oh," Michael said, surprised.

"Good evening," Mrs. Heggener said.

"Good evening," he said, not moving from the door. "Is anything wrong?"

"No. I was coming along the corridor and I happened to see the light under your door and I decided to make sure you were comfortable."

"Couldn't be more so." He noticed that she didn't explain what she was doing prowling around the hotel in the middle of the night.

"You're sure you have everything you need?"

"Everything."

She looked past him into the room. "Do you mind if I come in for a moment and see that everything's all right?"

"Of course." He stepped aside to let her pass him. He was about to close the door, then thought better of it and left it ajar.

Mrs. Heggener crossed the room, inspecting it as she did so. Michael was sorry he had thrown his overcoat and jacket over chairs and that he had left a pile of shirts on a table.

Mrs. Heggener touched the radiator. "Warm enough?"

"Just right."

"The wine cold enough?" she asked. "I could ring down for some ice."

"It's fine, thank you." He was feeling ill at ease. The sight of the handsome woman moving around his room so intimately in the middle of the night began to make him wonder if perhaps with her . . . "Oh," he said, making a sudden resolve, thinking, What have I got to lose? She's over twenty-one. "Would you like to join me in a little wine? There seem to be two glasses."

"So there are. I suppose Rita doesn't approve of solitary drinking." She seated herself across from the chair in which he had been sitting, crossing her legs, showing a very pretty, rounded calf and a fine ankle. Whatever she was, she wasn't ill at ease.

He sat down and poured some wine for each of them.

"I was speaking about you this evening," Mrs. Heggener said.

"Oh, you were?" Maybe he ought to stop all this inane small talk and just grab her and see what happened. By now he was sure that it would not be what had happened in New York with the physiotherapist and the old girlfriend. His erection was firm and unmistakable, caught awkwardly in the folds of his shorts and trousers and he had to sit twisted to keep it from being noticeable, like an old-fashioned actor in a drawing room comedy.

"An old acquaintance of yours dropped by. David Cully. He was coming from a meeting and he gave me the schedule of the courses and the events they've planned from Thanksgiving until Christmas. As the head of the ski school he and I often have things to discuss for the benefit of my guests. He's a great favorite in town. I suppose this is the only place people remember that he won all those downhill races out West that year." She sighed. "Fame," she said. "Especially in America. People flicker on, then flicker off. I feel sorry for Mr. Cully, although he seems quite happy himself, with his wife and children. He said you'd been a beau of his wife, Norma, when you were here." .

"That isn't exactly true," Michael said, twisting again in the chair. "He didn't seem to take it too seriously," Mrs. Heggener said. "He said you were the stud of the year, you had all the girls chasing you." "I was young and exuberant in those days," Michael said lightly, although he disliked the. way the conversation was going. The word stud had always annoyed him and it sounded particularly provocative coming, accented, from Mrs. Heggener's lips.

"He said you were a very good ski teacher and that they tried to prevail upon you to come back."

"He said that?"

"You sound surprised."

"I thought we didn't part exactly friends," Michael said. "Anyway, I had other things to do."

"So I gather. Do you plan to teach again this year?"

"I've played with the idea."

"David said he'd like to see you. They're running short on instructors this year. There's a new lift just been put in and they have to expand."

"Maybe I'll look in on him."

"I ski, too," Mrs. Heggener said. "But I'm one of those timid souls who has to follow an instructor at all times."

"I must say, Mrs. Heggener," Michael said, "you don't look like a timid soul to me."

"Eva is the name, Mr. Storrs. And appearances can be deceiving. And remember, I am on my own home ground here in the hotel. No ski slope feels to me like my home ground." She poured some more wine for both of them, leaning forward as she did so, her breasts stretching the cloth of her dress a little. She put the bottle down and leaned back again. "I know all the instructors here well," she said. "Too well. As in Europe, the conversation is limited, to say the least. Country boys who are only beguiling when they are going downhill. In my country-peasants. Only you can't call anyone a peasant in America."

"No," he said. "In America we range only from middle-class to noble."

She looked at him speculatively. "I have a feeling that your conversation would not bore me."

She is getting ready to lay it on the line any minute now, he thought. "You must not flatter me, madam," Michael said ironically. "Eva," she said.

"Eva," he repeated.

"If I tell David I want you, he will assign you to me as a private instructor. I pay the ski school and the ski school pays you. It is an impersonal arrangement."

"The best kind," he said. He sneaked a look at his watch. Halfpast twelve and we're still talking, he thought. But he'd be damned if he'd make the first overt move. "And if you find that my conversation, too, bores you . . . ?"

She shrugged. "I will tell David that we do not hit it off. That you go too slow for me, or too fast, or are too demanding. And ask him to suggest someone else."

Bitch, he thought, but sounded interested as he asked, "Do you ski every day?"

"No. Only sporadically. And in the afternoons mostly. But I like to have the instructor on tap in case I get a sudden urge to go up the hill. When I am in a dark mood, I seem to want to ski more often. It is a way of forgetting." Her speech, he noticed, was beginning to sound a little thick, the accent more marked. He wondered if she had been drinking all evening, alone. "I thank God for winter," she went on, her voice crooning sadly now.

"What do you have to forget?"

"That I am living in a country not my own." She seemed on the verge of tears and Michael wondered if she was one of those women who had to cry a man into bed. "That when I want to see my husband, I must go to clinics, hospitals all over the country, different places, every time my husband hears of a doctor who has developed a new treatment or one who has saved a patient's life. . . . That when he is at home with me, I am a nurse. That when I say, Take me home to Austria, he says, Yes, dear, perhaps next year. He was bom there, you know . . ."

"I know," Michael said. "Ellsworth told me."

"But when he goes there, he can't stand it for more than a week at a time. It is a make-believe country, he says, it is no place for him."

Finally, Michael felt moved, although whether it was for the woman who, acting or not, was on the verge of tears, or for the doomed husband he had not yet met, he did not know. He leaned forward and took her hand. It was cool and steady and limp in his own hand. "I hope I will not go too slow for you or too fast for you or be too demanding," he said. Now he didn't know whether it was he who was acting or whether he honestly wanted to console her.

"Do you mean that?" she whispered dramatically, breathing deeply.

"Yes, I do."

"We shall see," she said abruptly. She withdrew her hand, stood up and moved quickly to the door. He watched, stunned, thinking, What in hell was that all about?

She stopped at the half-open door, then pulled it shut with a sharp little click and locked it. She turned and faced him, her head high, put her hands up to her hair, pulled something, and the ash blond hair, almost reddish in the firelight, cascaded down over her shoulders to her breasts and to the middle of her back in golden tumult. "Now," she said, staring at him seriously, "please put out the damned light."

Her body was deceptive. Given her height and the narrowness of her face, he had taken it for granted she was thin and angular. Her figure had been hidden in the loose black gown. But now he saw it was full and rounded, nourished on Viennese pastries and pots of rich hot chocolate mit Schlag from the best confiseries of the old capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The ascetic face proved also an illusion. There was nothing ascetic about her tastes and no reticence in her performance. She was instructive and demanding and he, reveling in the renascence of his virility, was happily instructed and answered all her demands. In the imperial balls in the old palace it must have been one of her grandmothers who led the waltzes, not the hussar who was her partner. Half-smothered in the fragrant flood of her hair, he could not help but think, in one of the rare moments he thought at all, the physiotherapist should see me now.

He had no idea how much time passed before she finally rolled off him and stretched out beside him, one leg across him. She sighed contentedly. "Another way of forgetting," she said. "Maybe the best."

He noted, a little bitterly, for future reference, that she was categorizing him merely as a teammate in a particularly vigorous sport and he was not pleased with the image. Affection, he guessed, was not in her repertoire.

"And to think," she said, "all Europeans keep saying that Americans don't know how to make love. And I listened to them." She chuckled, rolled a little closer to him and kissed him under the ear. "You said before that you would stay at least for the season. If all went well. Has all gone well?"