The Borrowers Afield by Mary Norton Read Free Book Online Page B

to a chair, from a chair to the floor. Just because I was a girl, and not allowed to go borrowing, it doesn't say I haven't got the gift..."
    Suddenly, raising her head, she saw the blue sky above her, through the tracery of leaves—leaves which trembled and whispered as, in her haste, she swayed their stems. Placing her foot in a fork and swinging up, she caught her petticoat on a wild rose thorn and heard it rip. She picked the thorn out of the stuff and held it in her hand (it was the size to her of a rhinoceros horn to a human being): it was light in proportion to its bulk, but very sharp and vicious-looking. "We could use this for something," Arrietty thought. "I must think ... some kind of weapon..." One more pull and her head and shoulders were outside the hedge; the sun fell hot on her hair, and dazzled by the brightness, she screwed her eyes up as she gazed about her.
    Hills and dales, valleys, fields and woods—dreaming in the sunshine. She saw there were cows in the next field but one. Approaching the wood, from a field on the lower side, she saw a man with a gun—very far away, he looked, very harmless. She saw the roof of Aunt Sophy's house and the kitchen chimney smoking. On the turn of a distant road, as it wound between the hedges, she saw a milk-cart: the sunlight flashed on the metal churn and she heard the faint fairylike tinkle of the harness brasses. What a world-mile upon mile, thing after thing, layer upon layer of un-imagined richness—and she might never have seen it! She might have lived and died, as so many of her relations had done, in dusty twilight—hidden behind a wainscot.
    Coming down, she found a rhythm: a daring swing, a letting go and a light drop into thickly clustered leaves which her instinct told her would act as a safety net, a cage of lissom twigs which sprang to hand and foot—lightly to be caught, lightly to be let go. Such leaves clustered more thickly toward the outside of the hedge, not in the bare hollows within, and her passage amongst them was almost like surf-riding—a controlled and bouncing slither. The last bough dropped her lightly on the slope of a grassy bank, springing back into place above her head, as lightly she let it go, with a graceful elastic shiver.
    Arrietty examined her hands: one was slightly grazed. "But they'll harden up," she told herself. Her hair stood on end and was filled with bark dust, and there in her white embroidered petticoat she saw a great tear.
    Hurriedly, she picked three more strawberries as a peace offering and, wrapping them in a violet leaf so as not to stain her vest, she scrambled down the bank, across the ditch, and into the clump of long grass.
    Homily, at the entrance to the boot, looked worried as usual.
    "Oh, Arrietty, where ever have you been? Breakfast's been ready this last twenty minutes. Your father's out of his mind!"
    "Why?" asked Arrietty, surprised.
    "With worrying about you—with looking for you."
    "I was quite near," Arrietty said. "I was only in the hedge. You could have called me."
    Homily put her finger on her lips and glanced in a fearful way from one side to another: "You can't call, " she said, dropping her voice to an angry whisper. "We're not to make any noise at all, your father says. No calling or shouting—nothing to draw attention. Danger, that's what he said there is—danger on all sides..."
    "I don't mean you have to whisper," Pod said, appearing suddenly from behind the boot, carrying the half nail scissor (he had been cutting a small trail through the thickest grass). "But don't you go off, Arrietty, never again without you say just where you're going and what for and for how long. Understand?"
    "No," said Arrietty uncertainly. "I don't quite—I mean I don't always know what I'm going for— " (for what, for instance, had she climbed to the top of the hedge?) "Where is all this danger? I didn't see any. Excepting three cows two fields away."
    Pod looked thoughtfully to where a sparrow-hawk hung