‘I never have been able to understand how people can bear to shoot rabbits.’ ‘Hum,’ said Martin, grim and indifferent. ‘You mustn’t expect _me_ to be sentimental about ’em.’ His eyes roved round alertly; his gun was ready to go up in a trice. He was not giving a thought now to Judith walking beside him. Just over the crest of the hill came a sudden small kicking and flurry. A tiny pair of fur legs started away into the bracken, the white scut glancing and bobbing. But the bracken thinned away to nothing here: the small form was bound to emerge again in a moment. There was a sharp crack. ‘Aha!’ said Martin; and he went forward to where something flipped in the air and fell back again, horribly twitching in a mechanical and aimless motion. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ She stood rooted where he had left her, aghast. He was stooping to examine it.... She knew how it was looking--laid on its flat side and shewing the tender and vulnerable whiteness beneath its frail stiff paws. He was stooping just as a figure had stooped above that other rabbit.... What years ago!... Roddy’s rabbit whose death and burial had started this awful loving. Who was it devilish enough to prepare these deliberate traps for memory, these malicious repetitions and agonizing contrasts? Oh, this world!... No hope, no meaning in it; nothing but perversities, cruelties indulged in for sport, lickings of lips over helpless victims. Men treated each other just as Martin treated small animals. The most you could hope for was a little false security: they gave you that to sharpen their pleasure in the blow they were preparing: even the ones that looked kind: Martin for instance. As for Roddy--Roddy liked experimenting. He chose girls sometimes: that was more voluptuous. She saw his face, pallid and grinning, crowds of leering faces, all his. The hillside darkened. She sank on her knees, shaking and perspiring. He was striding back. ‘I buried it,’ he called. ‘It was a little smashed about the head.’ She had to lift her face towards him; but she made it blind. He came and stood beside her--he dared to, red-handed as he was. ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t one of the cleanest shots,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I got him at too long a range. Still,--that’s one less.... Come on.’ Her mind would frame only one sentence; and she tried over and over again to say it. ‘I will not be a witness of your butcheries. I will not be a witness of your butcheries.’ But he would not understand. Perhaps it did not make sense anyway. ‘Oh dear!’ She sat there, tearing up turf with shaking cold wet hands, face averted, eyes staring, mouth open and out of shape, impossible to control. ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!’ The repetition was a sort of whine or mew. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said sharply. He sank down beside her, and his astounded face came round her shoulder. ‘Oh, the poor little thing, the poor little thing!...’ ‘Do you mean the rabbit?’ She nodded.