He ran on up the road, until he passed the village and came to his woodland.

He followed the cart path through it, until he was near the boundary wall; then he threw himself down in the midst of some young brakes and little wild green things, and presently fell to weeping, with loud sobs, like a baby.
All day he had been strained up to an artificial height of manhood; now he had come down again to his helpless estate of boyhood.

In the solitude of the woods there is no mocking, and no despite for helplessness and grief.

The trees raising their heads in a great host athwart the sky, the tender plants beneath gathering into their old places with tumultuous silence, put to shame no outcry of any suffering heart of bird or beast or man.

To these unpruned and mother-fastnesses of the earth belonged at first the wailing infancy of all life, and even now a vague memory of it is left, like the organ of a lost sense, in the heart oppressed by the grief of the grown world.
The boy unknowingly had fled to his first mother, who had soothed his old sorrow in his heart before he had come into the consciousness of it.