"Now we must have something to eat," he said.
"But we, poor church-mice, have nothing!" she laughed.
"Who told you so?" he asked, and produced proudly a paper bag from his coat pocket.
It contained a squashed crumbly piece of confectionery. He laid it between them and they spooned the crumbs up to their mouths with their hands. It had a sweet winey flavour, and Lilly identified it at once as punch-tart, for which she had a special weakness.
"The English call it tipsy-cake," he said. "You can get quite screwed on it."
"I don't mind risking it," she answered gleefully.
She threw herself on her back, folding her hands as a cushion behind her head. She lay thus motionless for a few minutes, gazing up at the round patch of sky that gleamed through a parting in the masses of foliage above. Luminous pink flakes of cloud floated in the ocean of ether; a little further away a blue shimmer broke through the lower sky, like the earnest of another heaven. Lilly stretched up her arms in longing.
"Are you trying to catch larks?" he asked.
"No, not larks, but the falling leaves," she said.
Like maimed birds, they kept dropping from the boughs, fluttering about in spirals when they reached the ground, as if uncertain where to sit.