frowning as if in disapprobation.

'Didn't you know? Oh yes!--I thought you knew. He and his brother were
playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the gun,
and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn't it a
horrible story?'

'How fearful!' cried Gudrun. 'But it is long ago?'

'Oh yes, they were quite boys,' said Ursula. 'I think it is one of the
most horrible stories I know.'

'And he of course did not know that the gun was loaded?'

'Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in the stable for
years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off, and of course, no one
imagined it was loaded. But isn't it dreadful, that it should happen?'

'Frightful!' cried Gudrun. 'And isn't it horrible too to think of such
a thing happening to one, when one was a child, and having to carry the
responsibility of it all through one's life. Imagine it, two boys
playing together--then this comes upon them, for no reason
whatever--out of the air. Ursula, it's very frightening! Oh, it's one
of the things I can't bear. Murder, that is thinkable, because there's
a will behind it. But a thing like that to HAPPEN to one--'

'Perhaps there WAS an unconscious will behind it,' said Ursula. 'This
playing at killing has some primitive DESIRE for killing in it, don't
you think?'

'Desire!' said Gudrun, coldly, stiffening a little. 'I can't see that
they were even playing at killing. I suppose one boy said to the other,
"You look down the barrel while I pull the trigger, and see what
happens." It seems to me the purest form of accident.'

'No,' said Ursula. 'I couldn't pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in
the world, not if some-one were looking down the barrel. One
instinctively doesn't do it--one can't.'

Gudrun was silent for some moments, in sharp disagreement.

'Of course,' she said coldly. 'If one is a woman, and grown up, one's
instinct prevents one. But I cannot see how that applies to a couple of
boys playing together.'

Her voice was cold and angry.

'Yes,' persisted Ursula. At that moment they heard a woman's voice a
few yards off say loudly:

'Oh damn the thing!' They went forward and saw Laura Crich and Hermione
Roddice in the field on the other side of the hedge, and Laura Crich
struggling with the gate, to get out. Ursula at once hurried up and
helped to lift the gate.

'Thanks so much,' said Laura, looking up flushed and amazon-like, yet
rather confused. 'It isn't right on the hin