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 stepped back, he stood staring down, quivering and arguing with himself; then he took his cap and heavy overcoat from the closet. The coat called Alice to his feeling and he hesitated but opened the front door quietly.

Upon the porch, he stood and gazed down the street. Fidelia Netley had turned from the street; no one was in sight. He wondered whether anybody upstairs had happened to see her pass and now would see him follow her. He noticed that a light fluff of snow had fallen during the night and so late that it had not been tracked by people returning home in the evening; it lay like a heavy frost on the cleared sidewalk between the high, white ridges of the old snow.

He easily traced Fidelia's footprints and saw that she had turned the corner to the east and then made south on the avenue which ran along the edge of the campus which she followed on its turn east again. Evidently she was going to the lake. He hurried and soon came in sight of her.

She and he were the only people out on the lake shore at this clear, cold moment before sunrise. To the left lay the white campus of the university with nobody astir on its paths; to the right was a white stretch of park with stark, black trees; behind were the avenues of houses where people were only beginning to get up; directly before him, lay the white, winter hills and hummocks of the lake.

For the first cold weather of this winter had come with wind; gales had beaten waves upon the piers and over the sands of the shore, blowing up spray which froze and rolled with other drops and needles