But she still lingered. There was one more shape to pass through the door which she yet held open;--the phantom of her girlhood. And when at last, it had passed across the threshold, never to return, she shut the door softly, sinking to her knees there, her pale cheek resting against the closed panels, her eyes fixed on vacancy. * * * * * So departed those twain out of the room and out of her life, together--her lover by brevet, and her lingering girlhood,--leaving behind them a woman in a world of men suddenly strange and menacing and very still. But Clive went back into a familiar world--marred, obscured, distorted for the moment by shock and sorrow--but still a familiar world. Because neither his grief nor his love--as he had termed it--had made of him more than he had been,--not yet a man, yet no longer a boy, but something with all the infirmities of both and the saving graces of neither. In that borderland where he still lingered, morally and spiritually, the development of character ceases for a while until such time as the occult frontier be crossed. What is born in the cradle is lowered into the grave, but always either in nobler or less noble degrees. For none may linger in that borderland too long because the unseen boundary moves for him who will not stir when his time is up--moves slowly, inexorably nearer, nearer, passing beneath his feet, until it is lost far in the misty years behind him. * * * * * He wrote her from the steamer twice, the letters being mailed from Plymouth; then he wrote once from London, once from Paris; later again from Switzerland, where he had found it cooler, he said, than anywhere else during that torrid summer. [Illustration: "One lovely morning in May she arose early in order to write to Clive."] Winifred Stuart and her mother had joined them for a motor trip through Dalmatia. He mentioned it in a letter to Athalie, but after that he did not refer to them again. In fact he did not write again for a month or two. It proved to be a scorching summer in New York. May ended in a blast of unseasonable weather, cooling off for a week or two in June, but the furnace heat of July was terrible for the poor and for the horses--both of which we have always with us. Also, for Athalie, it seemed to be turning into one of those curious, threatening years which begin with every promise but which end without fulfilment, and in perplexity and care. She had known such years; she already recognised the symptoms of changing weather. She seemed to be conscious of premonitions in everybody and everything. Little vexations and slight disappointments increased; simple plans miscarried for no reason at all apparently.