"Who told you so?" he asked, triumphantly producing a small paper package from his pocket, which contained a mashed, crumbly piece of cake. They laid it between them and ate the morsels from their hollowed hands, laughing all the while. The cake tasted like sweet wine, and Lilly felicitously hit upon its correct name, punch-tart, of which she was especially fond. "The English call it tipsy-cake," he explained. "It quite befuddles one." "That amount of intoxication I'll risk," she laughed, and threw herself on her back, folding her hands behind her head. She lay there a time without moving and looked up to the sky, of which jagged oval bits shimmered through the foliage. Rosy flakes swam in the opalescent ether, and way beyond appeared the vault of another heaven, which in some places burst through the nearer sky like a deep blue foreboding. Lilly stretched her arms upward yearningly. "Do you want to catch the larks?" he asked. No, not that, but she would like to have one of the falling leaves. They kept dropping, dropping from the boughs like birds with broken wings, and fluttered over the ground in little spirals, as if undecided where to rest. "We'll see to which of us the first one comes," he said, and also stretched himself on his back. "The one to whom a leaf comes first will be blessed with a great piece of good fortune," she added. They lay still and waited. At last one floated toward him and prepared to settle on his nose. But he would not permit this--hers must be that great piece of good fortune--and he blew the leaf back to her. She in turn was too proud to accept so munificent a gift and blew it back to him. Thus laughing and tossing themselves about, they kept the leaf whirling between them, and suddenly in the heat of the struggle their lips touched--touched and would not separate. The next instant they held each other in close embrace, and the instant after she was his. * * * * * The rill purled, the leaves fell as before. But a fiery mist lay upon the earth, and all over small suns winked rainbow coloured eyes. Why had it happened? She fell back without thinking and noticed that the heavens above were also clothed in fire. Her comrade sat beside her with his back curved like a berated schoolboy and rubbed his nails against one another. "Oh, let's go home," said Lilly, downheartedly. "As my lady commands," he replied, grotesquely respectful again. She laughed a weary, mirthless laugh. Apparently he was concerned with getting rid of what had happened as speedily as possible. "Oh, now it's all the same," she sighed; "now we can quite calmly call each other by our first names." CHAPTER XXI First came dread, the same senseless dread that had dominated Lilly's being before her engagement. It stiffened her limbs, bound her arms to her body, crippled her knees, beat against the walls of the veins in her neck and created a black void in her brain.