‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’ It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable.... Then again, after a long time: ‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’ He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped the rabbit in them. She picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s--what is it?’--and she felt choked, drowning. They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears. ‘I say, _don’t_,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice. She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the body, and he took it away. He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said: ‘Come and look.’ Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory of a Rabbit.’ Peace and comfort flowed in upon her.... The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow. ‘Oh, Roddy!’ He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognisably his gesture and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered round him in distress, with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of people. She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall I never, never understand him?’