“My chief concern is to get you back to the hotel—alive,” he observed grimly.
Jean looked at him quickly.
“Is it as bad as that?” she asked more soberly.
“No. At least I hope not. I didn’t mean to frighten you”—hastily. “Only it seemed a trifle incongruous to be contemplating a dance when we may be struggling through several feet of snow in half an hour.”
The fierce gusts of wind, lashing the snow about them in bewildering eddies, made conversation difficult, and they pushed on in a silence broken only by an occasional word of encouragement from the Englishman.
“All right?” he queried once, as Jean paused, battered and spent with the fury of the storm.
She nodded speechlessly. She had no breath left to answer, but once again her lips curved in a plucky little smile. A fresh onslaught of the wind forced them onwards, and she staggered a little as it blustered by.
“Here,” he said quickly. “Take my arm. It will be better when we get into the pine-wood. The trees there will give us some protection.”
They struggled forward again, arm in arm. The swirling snow had blotted out the distant mountains; lowering storm-filled clouds made a grey twilight of the day, through which they could just discern ahead the vague, formless darkness of the pine-wood.
Another ten minutes walking brought them to it, only to find that the blunted edge of the storm was almost counterbalanced by the added difficulties of the surrounding gloom. High up overhead they could hear the ominous creak and swing of great branches shaken like toys in the wind, and now and again the sharper crack of some limb wrenched violently from its parent trunk. Once there came the echoing crash of a tree torn up bodily and flung to earth.