When at last the garden-gate had closed behind him and he had entered the darkness of Pond Lane, he found that in his mental exhaustion all manner of queer little objects, casually noted during his months in Dorset, were floating in upon him. The bell-handle of Mrs. Herbert’s door, the white scar on the hand of that old waiter at the Lovelace, the stunted laburnum-branch in his backyard⁠—his mind had to make a definite effort to throw off these things.

“I’ve got a sort of under-life,” he thought, “full of morbid hieroglyphics. Something must have died down there, and the blowflies are laying their eggs in it.”

Gathering up all the spiritual strength he possessed, he flung his mind outwards, far over those silent reaches of meadow-grass and fallow land. He imagined as vividly as he could all that was going on in that darkened margin of Blackmore. He followed the skulking of foxes under the hazels, the stirrings of hedgehogs in their hibernating-quiescence, the crouching of birds on leafless boughs, the burrowing of moles under their hillocks, the breathing of cattle in their barns.