And one night the great light on Montauk Point stared at him across leagues of unseen water. He was in touch again with his own half of the earth, nearing the edges of the great, raw, sprawling Continent where no delicate haze of tradition softened sordid facts; where there reigned no calm and ordered philosophy of life; where everything was in extremes; where everything was etched sharply against aggressive backgrounds; where there were no misty middle distances, no tranquil spaces; only the roaring silences of deserts to mitigate the yelling dissonance of life. He saw the sun on the gilded tips of snowy towers piled up like Alpine cliffs; the vast webs of bridges stretching athwart a leaden flood; forests of masts and huge painted funnels; acres of piers and docks; myriads of craft crossing and recrossing the silvery flood flowing between great cities. On the red castle to the southwest a flag flew, sun-dyed, vivid, lovely as a flower. His eyes filled; he choked. "Thank God," he thought, "I’m where I belong at last!" And so Cleland came home. *CHAPTER XVII* It was late afternoon before Cleland got his luggage unpacked and himself settled in the Hotel Rochambeau, where he had been driven from the steamer and had taken rooms. The French cuisine, the French proprietor and personnel, the French café in front, all helped to make his home-coming a little less lonely and strange. Sunlight fell on the quaint yellow brick façade and old-fashioned wrought iron railings, and made his musty rooms and tarnished furniture and hangings almost cheerful. He had not telephoned to Stephanie. He had nothing to say to her over the wire. From the moment he crossed the gang-plank the growing resentment had turned to a curious, impotent sort of anger which excited him and stifled any other emotion. She had not known that he was coming back. He had made no response to her cablegram. She could not dream that he had landed; that he was within a stone’s throw of her lodgings. The whole thing, too, seemed unreal to him—to find himself here in New York again amid its clamour, its dinginess, its sham architecture and crass ugliness!—back again in New York—and everything in his life so utterly changed!—no home—the 80th Street house still closed and wired and the old servants gone or dead; and the city empty of interest and lonely as a wilderness to him since his father’s death—and now Steve gone! nothing, now, to hold him here—for the ties of friends and clubs had loosened during his years abroad, and his mind and spirit had become formed in other moulds. Yet here he knew he must do his work if ever he was to do any. Here was the place for the native-born—here his workshop where he must use and fashion all that he had witnessed and learned of life during the golden hours through which he sauntered under the lovely skies of an older civilization.