It was long before he was able to give her an intelligible account of what had taken place. She asked him if he had found it dead. In answer he could only shake his head, but that head-shake had a whole tragedy in it. Then she examined “the little one,” but could find no mark of any wound upon it. When at length she learned how the case was, she tried to comfort him, insisting he was not to blame, for he did not mean to kill the little one. He would not hearken to her loving sophistry. “No, mother!” he said through his sobs; “I wouldn’t have blamed myself, though I should have been very sorry, if I had killed him by accident--if I had stepped upon him, or anything of that kind; but I meant to frighten him! I looked bad at him! I made him think I was an enemy, and going to kill him! I shammed bad--and so was real bad.” He stopped with a most wailful howl. “Perhaps he knew me,” he resumed, “and couldn’t understand it. It was much worse than if I had shot him. He wouldn’t have known then till he was dead. But to die of terror was horrible. Oh, why didn’t I think what I was doing?” “Nobody could have thought of such a thing happening.” “No; but I ought to have thought, mother, of what I was doing. I was trying to frighten him! I must have been in a cruel mood. Why didn’t I think love to the little one when I saw him, instead of thinking death to him? I shall never look a rabbit in the face again! My heart must have grown black, mother!” “I don’t believe there is another rabbit in England would die from such a cause,” persisted his mother thoughtfully. “Then what a superior rabbit he must have been!” said Clare. “To think that I pulled down the roof of his church upon him!” He burst into a torrent of tears, and ran to his own room. There his mother thought it better to leave him undisturbed. She wisely judged that a mind of such sensibility was alone capable of finding the comfort to fit its need. Such comfort he doubtless did find, for by the time his mother called him to tea, calmness had taken the place of the agony on his countenance. His mother asked him no questions, for she as well as her husband feared any possible encouragement to self-consciousness. I imagine the boy had reflected that things could not go so wrong that nobody could set them right. I imagine he thought that, if he had done the rabbit a wrong, as he never for a moment to the end of his life doubted he had, he who is at the head of all heads and the heart of all hearts, would contrive to let him tell the rabbit he was sorry, and would give him something to do for the rabbit that would make up for his cruelty to him. He did once say to his mother, and neither of them again alluded to the matter, that he was sure the rabbit had forgiven him. “Little ones are _so_ forgiving, you know, mother!” he added. Is it any wonder that my friend Clare Skymer should have been no sportsman? Chapter VIII.