The last crowd of all had been Marget’s cottage crowd, where there had been no room for him and little breath, but now he was coming back from it as he had come from all the rest, from press and clamour and hurry into unpeopled peace. He had escaped on to the edge of the sand, where always the hunted stag turns to safety and the sea. Now he could look along the flat which rested the eye, and breathe the far-travelled air which only the west wind had breathed before. There were evening and sun and shadows, and fields, and deep-rooted mountains, and slow beasts. There was a breeze stirring the shore-grasses that in all their lives never know what it is to be really still, and on the top of the bank others quivered and bent, and straightened and bent and quivered again. Bending, they looked like delicate strokes of a slanting pen, slashed on the golden page of the open west. The railway arches over the sand looked like great black doors shut between him and the coloured park that lay behind. Only the one through which they had come stood open wide, showing the ribbon of road laid flatly through. Beyond, where it fled away from the open marsh, it coiled into shadow by wall and stooping tree. When night came, that door, too, would close, so that Marget, however she tried, could never pass. He would remember that when he went upstairs to bed, and sleep steadily unafraid in the house at the sand’s edge. If the moon chose to look in, he would not care for the moon. It would have none of the terror of Marget’s peering eye, that had sometimes awakened him as he lay and dreamed. Yes, he was coming back as he had come before, and not even in dreams would he come like this again. Into this last, long, beautiful journey he had gathered his life, and men—old men—were not allowed to do that twice. Now in the house on the edge of the sands he would stay quietly until he died. Thomas and Agnes would want to take him out—to market and church and Milthrop Cattle Fair, but however they urged he did not mean to go. He had the fairs and the rest of them in his mind, and did not need to go looking for them afield. Besides, if he went, he would only find them strange, a confusion of strange faces and still stranger backs. Thomas and Agnes would fret and think he was getting moped, but after a bit they would let him have his way. He would watch them trundle away and wave his stick, and they would stop and call to know if he had changed his mind. But he would never change his mind or leave his recovered inheritance for an hour. Somewhere there was a point where the mind never changed again, but stayed as still as the earth in a new-dropped wind. And the point where he would stay in that poised stillness would surely be the home of all his dreams.