Some soft folk music had started to play, and Stanley asked her to dance with him. They got up from the table and slow danced, arm in arm for nearly two hours.

“I suppose I had best get started on walking you home,” he said at last.

When they reached her house, she invited him in and sat down on the couch with him. They talked for a few minutes, and then she saw that he was moving his face towards her to kiss her. She put her own mouth up as well and slowly closed her eyes.

They kissed for some time, and then Colleen gave a wide yawn.

“If only a leprechaun had seen that, he’d have a preview of his interim destination,” she said.

Stanley yawned too.

“You’re as tired as me, and it’s really too late for you to be going out in the night again now. Why don’t you take this couch, and in the morning we can try again for a leprechaun in the meadow?”

“Do you think you’ll ever snare one?” asked Stanley.

“I do have a secondary game plan to draw one out,” said Colleen, “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

She fetched him a blanket and pillow, and he found the couch as wide and comfortable as his own single bed. He pulled the blanket over his head and soon dropped off.

Colleen walked quietly across the carpet and into another room, and then wheeled something mechanical into the lounge room, where Stanley was out like a light. She pressed some switches on the mechanical object and watched it working.

“This might just help us in the meadow tomorrow,” she whispered to herself, and turned the device off.

Colleen went to her bedroom and slept. In the morning, she returned to the lounge room and sat by the couch, waiting for Stanley to awaken. Half an hour later, she saw him remove the blanket from his eyes and look up, to realise that both he and the couch had been reduced to tiny size by the device that she had used the night before.

“I created this reducing machine very recently, and you seemed the ideal person to test it on,” she said, “At that size you could enter the meadow, without frightening any leprechauns away. Once you’d drawn one out, it would be much easier for me to charge in and catch him. Would you be willing to give it a try?”

“Of course I would. If it works, and I lure one out for you, would you give me a kiss with your lovely full sized lips?”

“You can have one anyway, right now,” she said, and lifted him off the couch and pressed her lips to his face.

“Thank you so much. That was lovely,” he said.

She put him on the table while she ate her breakfast and gave him abundant portions of the best food in her fridge, at negligible cost to her supplies, and then took out a picnic basket, and put a rug and some other items inside it. She carried the basket in one hand and held him gently in the other.

“I guess leprechaun hunting season is now officially open,” he said.