The line texts of hexagram 24 grade the return by how soon it happens, and that gradation is the hexagram's most useful feature in a reading.
The first line is return from a short distance, before going far astray, with no need for remorse. The second is quiet return, good fortune. The third is repeated return, coming back again and again, which the text calls dangerous but not blameworthy. The fourth walks in the midst of others and returns alone. The fifth is noblehearted return, without regret. The sixth is missing the return, and it is the only genuinely bad line in the figure: misfortune, calamities from without, armies defeated, and a ruler whose misfortune lasts ten years.
That scale, from turning back immediately to having left it too late, is the practical content, and it turns the hexagram into a question rather than a statement. The reading is not simply "things are improving"; it is "how far has this gone, and is the return still available?"
The third line is the one readers most often recognise. Repeated return describes the person who keeps correcting course and keeps drifting back, and the text's verdict on them is unusually generous: dangerous, yes, but no blame. A book that had wanted to moralise had an easy opportunity here and declined it.
Wilhelm, Legge and the later versions agree closely on this hexagram, which tends to be true wherever the line texts are structured as a graded series. A sequence leaves the translator much less room than a single dense judgement does.