In her bedroom were photographs of Catharine's children and of the little boy which Doris had brought into the world; and sometimes, in the hot midsummer afternoons, she would lie on her pillow and look at these photographs until the little faces faded to a glimmer as slumber dulled her eyes. Captain Dane came once or twice to spend the day with her; and it was pleasant, afterward, for her to remember this big, blond, sunburnt man as part of all that she most cared for. Together they drove and walked and idled through house and garden: and when he went away, to sail the following day for those eternal forests which conceal the hearthstone of the Western World, he knew from her own lips about her love for Clive. He was the only person she ever told. A few of her friends she asked to the house for quiet week-ends; the impression their visits made upon her was pleasant but colourless. And it seemed singular, as she thought it over, how subordinate, how unaccented had always been all these people who came into her life, lingered, and faded out of it, leaving only the impressions of backgrounds and accessories against which only one figure stood clear and distinct--her lover's. Yes, of all men she had ever known, only Clive seemed real; and he dominated every scene of her girlhood and her womanhood as her mother had been the only really living centre of her childhood. All else seemed to her like a moving and subdued background,--an endless series of grey scenes vaguely painted through which figures came and went, some shadowy and colourless as phantoms, some soberly outlined, some delicately tinted--but all more or less subordinate, more or less monochromatic, unimportant except for balance and composition, as painters use indefinite shapes and shades so that the eyes may more perfectly concentrate on the centre of their inspiration. And the centre of all, for her, was Clive. Since her mother's death there had been no other point of view for her, no other focus for the forces of her mind, no other real desire, no other content. He had entered her child's life and had become, instantly, all that the child-world held for her. And it was so through the years of her girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and in which now her mind and spirit had found Nirvana. All men, all women, seemed to have their shadowy being only to make this man more real to her.