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Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air, the

brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries

of the beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps

of the guns that followed, fascinated him and filled him with a

sense of delightful freedom. He was dominated by the carelessness

of happiness, by the high indifference of joy.

Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in

front of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs

throwing it forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of

alders. Sir Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was

something in the animal's grace of movement that strangely

charmed Dorian Gray, and he cried out at once, "Don't shoot it,

Geoffrey. Let it live."

"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare

bounded into the thicket, he fired. There were two cries heard,

the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in

agony, which is worse.