He rose from his knees and stood erect, supremely prepared, and fell in a clutching heap as they came about. For a moment he sat still, grasping at his wits, confounded by violent defraudation and shock. Now they were hove to under the farmyard wall, but it did not seem to him that they had really arrived. The boat seemed limp and broken, injured though not dead, a flapping, fretting thing checked in its flight before the goal was reached. He felt a blinding spasm of rage as if he had been robbed, and even when he stood on the shore and watched the boat beat back, he was still cheated and angry in his heart. Now he was conscious that he was very tired, just a weary player coming home in the dawn. He turned at last and walked slowly to the house, and was glad of the open doorway in his path. As he walked he looked at the window upstairs, but without either exaltation or desire. He had been so near perfection, as it seemed, and at the impossible moment it had escaped. The room was still there, but his passionate impulse towards it had died down. In youth one seeks one’s sacred place on wings; it is only in later life that it is sweet to climb to it by a homely stair. Bob had stopped the horse and scrambled down, and was busy with the latch of a gate. Kit brought himself back to the present with a jerk, though the floor of the trap was still the light, curving timbers of the yacht. In front of him was a long, green road, a wide alley hedged on either side, with the dykes beside the hedges so full of growth that they looked almost level with the level road. The hedges themselves, as far as he could see, were pink with little rose-faces and purple with vetch. Now they were nearly home; the green road always meant that they were nearly home. Bob took the horse by the head and called to his father to take the reins, and he gathered them up shakingly, glad, after so long, to feel the touch of the rough leather against his hands. But all the time he was troubled by a sense of something amiss, in spite of the green road that meant the journey’s end. He wondered why he had lived again that vivid experience on the boat. The shadow of that disillusionment long ago seemed stretching also across this perfect hour.