Brent listened to all of this and thought that Henry had been very fortunate to have his affections reciprocated, and that he would have benefited from Miss Woodfield’s licks as much as she did.

“I walked up into the hills and far beyond Miss Balfour’s hillside house and off to a spot by the lake. I unrolled the sleeping bag, and got into it and snuggled Henry beside my cheek, just like we did every night here.”

“It sounds romantic,” said Brent.

“It was. We slept under the stars, neither of us wanting to eat anything, as we felt that digesting food would have made it harder to sleep without the usual luxuries of my bed at home. The next morning, we woke up and looked at the lake. It was a beautiful sight. I decided to get our breakfast out of the backpack and then take my empty water bottle down to the lake, fill it up first and then have a swim before breakfast. It was then that I discovered that the sharp edge of a can must have worn a hole in the bottom of the bag. Our food must have fallen out and gotten lost back when I’d been walking here. Henry had been riding on my shoulder with some of my hair in his hands to hold onto, and hadn’t noticed the food falling out behind us either. So there we were with empty stomachs all night, counting on revitalising ourselves with breakfast and no food at all to eat.”

“What did you do?” asked Brent.

“I told Henry I could still fill the water bottle from the lake, but wouldn’t find the walk all the way back home easy on an empty stomach, and that I’d have to eat the only food available.”

“But there wasn’t any.”

“There was one piece of meat that hadn’t been in the backpack when the hole developed, because it had been on my shoulder.”

“Henry!”

“It was the only thing I could think of to solve my problem. I told him that we didn’t have any other options. He reminded me that, when Miss Balfour had first reduced him, she had told him about eating leprechauns and perhaps the odd shrunken boy too, and that I’d said I had no interest in eating Henry. I explained to Henry, that when I had said that, I was talking about not feeling Miss Balfour’s desire to eat a reduced boy for the pure pleasure of it. I told him, that in this case, I needed to do it in order to relieve a pressing hunger, before embarking on the return home. I tried reasoning with him in every way I could think of, but he still didn’t want me to do it. In the end, I told him that he would simply have to get used to the idea, while I took a swim. I took off my skirt and pullover and carried him down to the lake in my bikini. I set him comfortably on a rock, where he could watch me swim, but he wouldn’t be able to climb down from it.”

At this point, Brent was feeling a sense of suspense which was more than that of every fictional cliffhanger he’d ever read or seen all combined into one story.