After decades of absence, a wealthy businessman returns to his hometown. Hardly having arrived, he becomes the center of interest, speculation, and petty fantasies of the locals. However, as a worldly man, he is far less vulnerable to the envy and character assassination that his fellow citizens direct at all those who have left the nest, compared to his neighbor, the young widow of the former bailiff. The encounter between these two loners becomes a fateful meeting. In "The Return," Hermann Hesse tells a tender love story in which two social outsiders, a globetrotter and a widow, find a new home and security in each other.