December 3.  It seems to me I am growing to be a dreadful egotist.  I put nothing down now in this little book but just what concerns myself—­nothing of the great subjects of universal interest which have always absorbed most of my thoughts, but just my own doings and sayings.  At this very moment I desire only to write about my afternoon, and the way in which I spent it.  I will indulge myself, and the record may serve me.  How it had snowed all day! how it did snow this afternoon when I started out, wrapped in my waterproof, accoutred to encounter the storm, and rejoicing in the absence of long skirts and hooped petticoats!  With my India-rubber boots I felt I could plod through any snow-drift, and I gained a pervading sense of exhilaration from the beating of the storm in my face.  I chose a certain street I had come to know, which ran straight through the town and on into a more thinly-settled suburb.  It was a good, clear path, and I should be able to have a splendid walk without meeting probably more than a dozen people in the course of it.  Just as I passed the last square of closely-built town-houses, and began to come upon the stretching white landscape before me, as I trudged along, turning my head a little aside to escape the brunt of the driving snow, I heard an exclamation of surprise, and a man’s voice said, “You here, Miss Linton?”

It was he, Mr. Lawrence.  There he stood, his eyes brilliant with the excitement of the storm, his cheek aglow with exercise, looking, as the old women say, “the very picture of a man.”  I am very sensitive to beauty, and his seems to me very great:  it draws me to him.

“Yes it is I,” I said (we had both stopped).  “I wanted exercise and air, and something to change my frame of mind; so I came out for a tramp.”

He turned with me, and we walked on.  In a moment more he said, “Will you take my arm?  It will be easier to keep step and walk fast then.”

I took it, and he looked down at me and said, with an inscrutable smile, which haunts me yet, I suppose because I can’t make out its meaning, “Do you believe in fate?”

“If you mean by fate something which the will is powerless to resist, against which it is unavailing to struggle, I do not,” I answered.  “Do you, Mr. Lawrence?”

He laughed, not a pleasant laugh, albeit musical, but as if his smile had been one with some hidden meaning in it:  “I hardly know what I believe.  Certainly some power seems to lay traps for our wills at times, and waylay us when they are off duty.  As, for instance,” he went on, “I wanted to see you to-day, and I did not go to see you:  my will acted perfectly well, and I seemed able to resist any temptation.  I came out here to walk alone, thinking that I should be even farther away from you here than elsewhere, when, lo! you start up in my path, and here we are together.  It is just as if some malicious spirit had mocked me with an idea of my own strength, only to betray me the better through my weakness.”  He spoke with an intensity which seemed out of place, and strangely unlike his usual calm manner.  Somehow, a feeling of great delight had come over me as he spoke.  I felt pleased—­why I do not know—­at his evident impatience and annoyance.