The Legend by Edith Wharton — Read

DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough / floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the / passage of time. Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in / retrospect, could only phrase it: "I floated. floated."

The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was / simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily / disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be reported to an / inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world / had made of him.