His consciousness, as he stood there, seemed to stretch out to all the reborn life in the whole countryside. “Good is stronger than Evil,” he thought, “if you take it on its simplest terms and set yourself to forget the horror! It’s mad to refuse to be happy because there’s a poison in the world that bites into every nerve. After all, it’s short enough! I know very well that Chance could set me screaming like a wounded baboon⁠—every jot of philosophy gone! Well, until that happens, I must endure what I have to endure.”

His mind returned again to the scene about him. “What a world it is, a little overgrown path, especially in the spring, when it isn’t choked up!” He tried to imagine what such a place must be to the rabbits, field-mice, hedgehogs, slowworms, who doubtless inhabited it. “Very much what Lenty Pond is to its frogs and minnows!” he thought. And then his mind, from visualizing those remote backwater-worlds, turned once more to Redfern.