Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.
‘I say, don’t,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.
She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.
‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another interval:
‘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.