The Return by Walter de la Mare — Read

The first faint streaks of dawn were silvering across the stars when Lawford again let himself into his deserted house. He stumbled down to the pantry and cut himself a crust of bread and cheese, and ate it, sitting on the table, watching the leafy eastern sky through the painted bars of the area window. He munched on, hungry and tired. His night walk had cooled head and heart. Having obstinately refused Mr. Bethany's invitation to sleep at the Vicarage, he had sat down on an old low wall, and watched until his light had shone out at his bedroom window. Then he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering gardens, under the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinking, hardly aware of himself except as in a faraway vision of a sluggish insignificant creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old, incomprehensible world.

The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau -- they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. "I wonder what they'll do? " had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had "What am I to do? " in the first bout of his "visitation."