All this meant spring, and spring meant hunting for snowdrops in the Meads. Jeremy informed Miss Jones, and Miss Jones was, of course, agreeable. They would walk that way after luncheon.
The Meads fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement down to the River Pol. Their long stretches of meadow are scattered with trees, some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire, and they are finally bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank. Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first, and the primroses afterwards, are so thick that, from the Cathedral walls, the Rope Walk looks as though it wandered between pools and lakes of gold. In the Orchards on the hill also they run like rivers.
Upon this afternoon there were only the trees, faintly pink, along the river and the wide unbroken carpet of green. Miss Jones walked up and down the Rope Walk, whilst Mary told her an endless and exceedingly confused story that had begun more than a week ago and had reached by now such a state of “To be continued in our next” that Miss Jones had only the vaguest idea of what it was all about. Her mind therefore wandered, as indeed, did always the minds of Mary's audiences, and Mary never noticed but stared with the rapt gaze of the creator through her enormous glasses, out into an enchanted world of golden princesses, white elephants and ropes and ropes of rubies. Miss Jones meanwhile thought of her young days, her illnesses and a certain hat that she had seen in Thornley's windows in the High Street. Jeremy, attended by Hamlet, hunted amongst the trees for snowdrops.
Hamlet had been worried ever since he could remember by a theory about rabbits. He had been told, of course, about rabbits by his parents, and it had even been suggested to him that he would be a mighty hunter of the same when he grew to a certain age. He had now reached that age, but never a rabbit as yet had he encountered. He might even have concluded that the whole Rabbit story was a myth and a legend were it not that certain scents and odours were for ever tantalising his nose that could, his instinct told him, mean Rabbit and only Rabbit. These scents met him at the most tantalising times, pulling him this way and that, exciting the wildest hopes in him, afterwards condemned to sterility; as ghosts haunt the convinced and trusting spiritualist, so did rabbits haunt Hamlet. He dreamt of Rabbits at night, he tasted Rabbits in his food, he saw them scale the air and swim the stream--now, he was close on their trail, now he had them round that tree, up that hill, down that hole... sitting tranquilly in front of the schoolroom fire he would scent them; always they eluded him, laughed at him, mocked him with their stumpy tails. They were rapidly becoming the obsession of his nights and days.