And now the hour had come for him to bid her good-bye. He said that he and his mother would not remain abroad for more than the summer. He said he would write often; spoke a little more vaguely of seeing her as soon as he returned; drew her cool, white hands together and kissed them, laid his cheek against them for a moment, eyes closed wearily.
The door remained ajar behind him after he had gone. Lingering, her hand heavy on the knob, she listened to the last echo of the elevator as it dropped into lighted depths below.
Then, very far away, an iron grille clanged. And that ended it.
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.