It was a very lonely place, but abounding with wild creatures--rabbits and squirrels, every kind of grasshopper and harmless insect, water-rats, moorfowl, and myriads of existences too small for names. He was woke by them as he lay, early--very early, before any human thing was stirring. He had slept feverishly, by intervals, through the night, and he woke up to a less confused sense of his misery in the morning. Gradually it broke upon him as the light came disclosing the landscape, creeping on and on. Oh, the horror of the remembering, the misery of shame, the intolerable sense of weakness, wrong, resentment, and impotence! Why was it so? Why was he born a cotter's son? Why was it a disgrace to him? How horrible! that he should be banished from the company of men, driven out into the wilds, aching every nerve of him, body and soul, miserable, abandoned, troubled, all because he was a cotter's son! Oh, wrong at which earth and heaven should cry out! Abel was not capable of realising that nothing but his own falsehood, his own cowardice, could have made his birth a shame to him--he was far beyond such an exercise of reason. He looked down from among his ferns and bushes to where the peaceful house of the Landales, where he should have been sleeping now in safety but for this, lay among the trees, and beyond it, on the banks of the shining water, saw the old Castle, whence he had been driven out, "to eat grass with the beasts of the field." That was what the old Eastern potentate had been sentenced to: was it to be _his_ fate too? Somehow it gave the poor fugitive, half-distraught, a kind of forlorn comfort to remember that old story. His thoughts went back to the old Bible lessons he remembered long ago. What had the king done to have such a fate? and what had _he_ done? But it gave him a little ease to realise that this had happened to some one else before. And where was he to go? He could not show his face in this familiar place, which had again grown so dear. He would go back--back to his lonely rooms in Oxford, where he ought to be safe, he thought. But how to get there, how to stir in that garish, lavish day, which flooded every dark corner with light, so that the water-newts and earth insects had much ado to get themselves into some covert place, and how was he to walk unseen, a man? He was faint for want of food, aching with the unusual exposure, his clothes wet and torn, his hat he did not know where, his head throbbing and buzzing and all confused. But yet he might have come round out of the painful bewilderment he was in; his thoughts began to take a little shape, his mind began to occupy itself with a practical question--how to get home unseen, how to get to the road and the railway, and go back whence he had come. All might have come again to something like nature--nature sore and bleeding and wounded to the heart, but yet able to command herself, able to be restored.