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you—"
    "Later," said Pod, "there'll be plenty of time: we'll talk about everything later."
    "That's right," said Homily. "You tell Timmus a story."
    "Not about owls?" pleaded Timmus; he still looked rather wide-eyed.
    "No," agreed Homily, "not about owls. You ask her to tell you about the dollhouse"—she glanced at Arrietty—"or that other place—what's it called now?—that place with the plaster borrowers?"
    But Arrietty seemed not to be listening. "You did mean it, didn't you?" she burst out suddenly.
    Homily and Pod stared back at her, startled by her tone. "Of course, we meant it," said Pod.
    "Oh," cried Arrietty, "thank goodness ... thank goodness," and her eyes filled suddenly with tears. "To be out of doors again ... to see the sun, to..." Running forward, she embraced them each in turn. "It will be all right—I know it will!" Aglow with relief and joy, she turned back to Timmus. "Come, Timmus, I know a lovely story—better than the dollhouse—about a whole town of houses: a place called Little Fordham...."

    This place, of recent years, had become a kind of legend to borrowers. How they got to know it no one could remember—perhaps a conversation overheard in some kitchen and corroborated later through dining room or nursery—but know of it they did. Little Fordham, it appeared, was a complete model village. Solidly built, it stood out of doors in all weather in the garden of the man who had designed it, and it covered half an acre. It had a church, with organ music laid on, a school, a row of shops, and—because it lay by a stream—its own port, shipping and custom houses. It was inhabited—or so they had heard—by a race of plaster figures, borrower-size, who stood about in frozen positions, or who, wooden-faced and hopeless, traveled interminably in trains. They also knew that from early morning until dusk troops of human beings wound around and about it, removed on asphalt paths and safely enclosed by chains. They knew—as the birds knew—that these human beings would drop litter—sandwich crusts, nuts, buns, half-eaten apples, ("Not that you can live on that sort of stuff," Homily would remark. "I mean, you'd want a change....") But what fascinated them most about the place was the number of empty houses—houses to suit every taste and every size of family: detached, semidetached, stuck together in a row, or standing comfortably each in its separate garden—houses that were solidly built and solidly roofed, set firmly in the ground, and that no human being, however curious, could carelessly wrench open—as they could with dollhouses—and poke about inside. In fact, as Arrietty had heard, doors and windows were one with the structure—there were no kinds of openings at all. But this was a drawback easily remedied. "Not that they'd open up the front doors—" she explained in whispers to Timmus as they lay curled up on Arrietty's bed. "Borrowers wouldn't be so silly: they'd burrow through the soft earth and get in underneath ... and no human being would know they were there."
    "Go on about the trains," whispered Timmus.
    And Arrietty went on, and on—explaining and inventing, creating another kind of life. Deep in this world she forgot the present crisis, her parents' worries and her uncle's fears, she forgot the dusty drabness of the rooms between the laths, the hidden dangers of the woods outside and that already she was feeling rather hungry.

Chapter Seven
    "But where are we going to?" asked Homily for about the twentieth time. It was two days later, and they were up in Arrietty's room sorting things for the journey, discarding and selecting from oddments spread round on the floor. They could only take—Pod had been very firm about this—what Lupy described as hand luggage. She had given them for this purpose the rubberized sleeve of the waterproof raincoat, which they had neatly cut up into squares.
    "I thought," said Pod, "we'd try first to make for that hole in the bank...."
    "I