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As Lennie clamps his hands over his ears and cries out for George, George silently emerges from the brush and the hallucination disappears.

The verb 'scuttled' is precisely chosen—an actual rabbit's gait reasserts itself in the moment the rabbit ceases to be metaphorical—and 'back into Lennie's brain' relocates the hallucination spatially rather than dispelling it, suggesting interior persistence rather than cure. George's 'quietly' here is the same adverb that has marked the heron and Lennie himself in this chapter; the predatory grammar continues to align speakers without their knowledge.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck refuses to grant his characters psychological resolution—the rabbit's 'scuttling back' rather than vanishing implies Lennie's tormentors remain alive within him to the moment of his death, denying readers any consolation that George's arrival has saved him from inner suffering.