Explore "The Return" by Walter de la Mare on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He was utterly wearied, but he walked on for a long while with a dogged unglancing pertinacity and without looking behind him. Then he rested under the dew-sodden hedgeside and buried his face in his hands. Once, indeed, he did turn and grind his way back with hard uplifted face for many minutes, but at the meeting with an old woman who in the late dusk passed him unheeded on the road, he stopped again, and after standing awhile looking down upon the dust, trying to gather up the tangled threads of his thoughts, he once more set off homewards.
It was clear, starry, and quite dark when he reached the house. The lamp at the roadside obscurely lit its breadth and height. Lamplight within, too, was showing yellow between the Venetian blinds; a cold gas-jet gleamed out of the basement window. He seemed bereft now of all desire or emotion, simply the passive witness of things external in a calm which, though he scarcely realised its cause, was an exquisite solace and relief. His senses were intensely sharpened with sleeplessness. The faintest sound belled clear and keen on his ear. The thinnest beam of light besprinkled his eyes with curious brilliance.