And even in other stories no good brother would allow his little sisters
to starve in the midst of plenty."

"Plenty?" repeated Robert hungrily; and the others looked vaguely round
the bare leads of the church-tower, and murmured, "In the midst of?"

"Yes," said Cyril impressively. "There is a larder window at the side of
the clergyman's house, and I saw things to eat inside--custard pudding
and cold chicken and tongue--and pies--and jam. It's rather a high
window--but with wings"--

"How clever of you!" said Jane.

"Not at all," said Cyril modestly; "any born general--Napoleon or the
Duke of Marlborough--would have seen it just the same as I did."

"It seems very wrong," said Anthea.

"Nonsense," said Cyril. "What was it Sir Philip Sidney said when the
soldier wouldn't give him a drink?--'My necessity is greater than his.'"

"We'll club together our money, though, and leave it to pay for the
things, won't we?" Anthea was persuasive, and very nearly in tears,
because it is most trying to feel enormously hungry and unspeakably
sinful at one and the same time.

"Some of it," was the cautious reply.

Everyone now turned out its pockets on the lead roof of the tower, where
visitors for the last hundred and fifty years had cut their own and