Then he suddenly found himself growing back to reach his normal size, just as her eyes opened.

“I’m awake again,” she said, “Did you have a nice walk?”

“It was very nice,” he said.

“I suppose it’s time to take you home,” said Mrs Parkin.

He wondered what would happen if he suddenly shrank down beside her as they were walking back to the Smith Estate, but his size remained constant. When he went to bed that night, he began to worry that he might never shrink again. To have lost the opportunity to see if Mrs Parkin would eat him was more than he could fathom. He yearned to shrink again, and then it happened.

“Now I can’t get to her though,” he thought, “I need to be full sized again.”

Once again, it happened. Before he went to sleep that night, he had fully learned to control the effects of the Wonderland cake. One problem still needed to be solved. If he told Mrs Parkin that he had long entertained the yearning for her to eat him, he had no idea how she would react. She might be upset with him, and he would miss out on the other aspect of warmth he had felt when she had stroked his head and spoken sweetly to him on the rug. On the other hand, if she would in fact like to eat him, and he never told her about his own willingness, the opportunity would be lost for both of them. He thought about all of the clues, reviewing everything that had happened. She had been willing to act out the story he’d chosen (The Three Little Pixies), had put some realism into it with her tongue, and had even told him that he tasted nice. Yet she had also seemed uncomfortable and gone to some effort to change the subject. Was this the embarrassment of someone who didn’t want her employer to find out that she harboured longings to eat the boy in her care? Or was it a discomfort with the unusual direction that Pixi had been leading the discussion?

He went to sleep with no solution in his mind. He had been taught to say his prayers, and had even seen how God heard and answered his prayers in surprising ways. The God of the Bible was not someone who merely created people and then left them to their own devices for 70 years or so, and assessed the results at the end. Jesus was very active in the lives of His own created beings.

Yet a boy’s desire to be eaten was something that the Bible simply didn’t cover. It did not make the book any less the perfect Word of God. It was just that the Bible had no precedent for shrinking boys who admired their governesses’ tongues.

He awoke and thought some more the next morning, and recalled the play that they had made of the story in his book. Then a significant thought occurred to Pixi: Mrs Parkin may or may not be reluctant to eat a boy with whom she had been so friendly as to treat him on his birthday. Yet she might well be more likely to consider eating an actual Pixie, like the ones in the story. All he had to do was to convince her that he was someone other than himself. Mrs Parkin didn’t know that he had acquired the power to shrink. So she wouldn’t suspect someone who resembled a pixie of being Pixi. But would she recognise his little face?

There were no lessons on Saturday and Sunday. So the next day, he put it to the test, by simulating the view of a tiny person’s face. To do this, he stood on the edge of the boundary between his property and the neighbouring one (where Mrs Parkin had been living). He waited until he saw her coming out into the garden to sit down and read. He looked at her face and could not clearly make out her features. Only a boy who thought so much like an adult would have come up with such a plan at the age of seven. He could not distinguish her facial features. She could have been anyone, if he wasn’t aware that nobody else lived there. How much harder would it be for her to make out his facial features, after he had shrunken to tiny size?

On the following day, Sunday, he went to Mrs Parkin’s garden again, having made himself familiar with her movements over the past few weeks. He shrank himself to tiny size in advance and waited until Mrs Parkin came out. Seeing the tiny boy, she put her book on the seat, sat down beside it and looked at him in surprise.