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borrowing easy. And Arrietty could not tell him. Once he knew the truth (she had been through it all before), there would be worry, despair, recriminations, and a pulling up of stakes.
    "Oh dear, oh dear," she breathed aloud unhappily, "whatever shall I do...?"
    Pod glanced at her sideways. "Sink down," he whispered, nudging her arm. "She's turned her head away. Sink slowly into the grasses ..."
    Arrietty was only too grateful to obey. Slowly their heads and shoulders lowered out of sight, and after a moment's pause to wait and listen, they crawled away among the grass stems, and taking swift cover by the churchyard wall, they slid to safety through their own back door.

Chapter Seven
    One day Miss Menzies began to talk back to Arrietty. At first, her amazement had kept her silent and confined her share of their conversations to the few leading questions that might draw Arrietty out. This for Miss Menzies was a most unusual state of affairs and could not last for long. As the summer wore on, she had garnered every detail of Arrietty's short life and a good deal of data besides. She had heard about the borrowed library of Victorian miniature books, through which Arrietty had learned to read and to gain some knowledge of the world. Miss Menzies, in her hurried, laughing, breathless way, helped add to this knowledge. She began to tell Arrietty about her own girlhood, her parents, and her family home, which she always described as "dear Gadstone." She spoke of London dances and of how she had hated them; of someone called "Aubrey," her closest and dearest friend—"my cousin, you see. We were almost brought up together. He would come to dear Gadstone for his holidays." He and Miss Menzies would ride and talk and read poetry together. Arrietty, listening and learning about horses, wondered if there was any kind of animal that she could learn to ride. You could tame a mouse (as her cousin Eggletina had done), but a mouse was too small and too scuttley: you couldn't go far on a mouse. A rat? Oh no, a rat was out of the question. She doubted even if Spiller would be brave enough to train a rat. Fight one, yes—armed with Pod's old climbing pin—Spiller was capable of that but not, she thought, of breaking a rat in to harness. But what fun it would have been to go riding with Spiller, as Miss Menzies had gone riding with Aubrey.
    "He married a girl called Mary Chumley-Gore," said Miss Menzies. "She had very thick ankles."
    "Oh...!" exclaimed Arrietty.
    "Why do you say 'Oh' in that voice?"
    "I thought he ought to have married you!"
    Miss Menzies smiled and looked down at her hands. "So did I," she said quietly. She was silent a moment, and then she sighed. "I suppose he knew me too well. I was almost like a sister." She was quiet again as though thinking this out, and then she added more cheerfully, "They were happy, though, I gather; they had five children and lived in a house outside Bath."

    And Miss Menzies, even before Arrietty explained to her, understood about being "seen." "You need never worry about your parents," she assured Arrietty. "I would never—even if you had not spoken—have looked at them directly. As far as we are concerned—and I can speak for Mr. Pott—they are safe here for the rest of their lives. I would never even have looked at you directly, Arrietty, if you had not crept up and spoken to me. But even before I saw any of you, I had begun to wonder—because, you see, Arrietty, your chimney sometimes smoked at quite the wrong sort of times; I only light the string for the visitors, you see, and it very soon burns out."
    "And you would never pick us up, any of us? In your hands, I mean?"
    Miss Menzies gave an almost scornful laugh. "As though I would dream of such a thing!" She sounded rather hurt.
    Miss Menzies also understood about Spiller: that when he came for his brief visits, with his offerings of nuts, corn grains, hard-boiled sparrows' eggs, and other delicacies, she would not see so much of