“Nathaniel hasn’t been eaten, because it’s not what Frances wants. You’re in a very different situation.”

She went on to tell him about her initial quest for leprechauns, and how she had made substitutes by shrinking Stanley and Patrick, and how Henry had snuck in and reduced himself to volunteer for the same culinary role in her happiness.

She licked his face and then took him down to the kitchen. She put him into the cage and then remembered Dick Flanigin’s escape. She locked the cage and put the key on the table in the lounge room, and left Tarquin’s cage on the high kitchen bench. Even if he somehow found a way to open the lock, he’d never get down to the floor.

“I’ll see you in the morning, sweet admirer,” she said, and walked off up to bed.

The next morning, Colleen came downstairs and found that he was gone. She checked all of her circuits and saw that the video cameras had been operating, but that the alarm circuit had been disconnected, preventing her from being woken up.

She suspected that Dick Flanigin had come back, trying to restore his size, and rescued Tarquin somehow, but she wanted to watch the video to make sure.

She checked the playback closely and was surprised at what she saw. It was not a video of Dick Flanigin, whom readers of previous chapters will remember had been gobbled whole by his former client Brenda Leesil.

The video circuit had been activated by two small beings suddenly popping into visibility with lanterns in their hands. Once visible, they had tripped the video record circuit with their presence, and popped in and out of visibility while using some tiny ropes they’d brought with them, to get up onto the kitchen bench with the key they’d found and unlock the cage. The camera had recorded them telling quite a story.

They were in fact real live leprechauns, whose kingdom was directly beneath the very meadow in which she’d been hunting for them. The legends were true, except that the ground had formed caverns as it had grown over  their kingdom after soil erosion of centuries ago. They had learned to live with lanterns and small tunnels that only they could fit through, which led them in and out of the kingdom.

They had seen everything that had transpired between Colleen and Stanley, while remaining invisible in the meadow, and after Stanley had been eaten, they had felt a sense of indirect responsibility for his plight. After all, Colleen had used him as a substitute for one of them. They had decided to keep an eye on Colleen and try to rescue anyone else she shrank. She guessed that they hadn’t known about Henry and Patrick, whom she’d met away from the meadow, but had later started to monitor her house anyway, and saw her arriving and taking Tarquin out of her handbag.

They had told Tarquin that they had no way to undo the shrinking process that Colleen had inflicted, but could let him live with them in their lamplit underground leprechaun kingdom. Tarquin had accepted, and been taken safely back there in the middle of the night.