She overhears Driver and the gardener, Crampfurl, discussing the Boy. Meanwhile, Arrietty has learned from Pod and Homily that when big people approach, they get a 'feeling.' She's concerned that she didn't have a feeling when the Boy approached, so she practises by going to a certain passage over which the cook, Mrs. On a later borrowing trip, she manages to slip the letter under the doormat where the Boy agreed to look for it. The Boy offers to take a letter to a badger sett two fields away where her Uncle Hendreary (father of Eggletina), Aunt Lupy, and their children are supposed to have emigrated. Arrietty realizes that she can't prove that there are any other Borrowers left in the world besides her and her parents and is upset. He disagrees and tells her of times when he had seen hundreds and even thousands of big people all in one place. At one point, Arrietty tells the Boy that there cannot be very many of his kind but there are many of her kind. Arrietty wanders outside where she meets the Boy, and develops a friendship with him. Several days later, Pod and Arrietty go on a borrowing trip to retrieve fibers from a doormat for a scrub brush. In the course of the ensuing conversation, Homily realises that Arrietty ought to be allowed to go borrowing with Pod.

Remembering the fate of their niece Eggletina, who wandered away and never returned after (unbeknownst to her) her father had been seen and the big people had brought in a cat, Pod and Homily decide to warn Arrietty.

After sending Arrietty to bed, Homily learns that he has been 'seen' by one of the big people - a boy who had been sent from India to live with his great-aunt while recovering from rheumatic fever. One day, Pod comes home shaken after borrowing a toy tea cup. As Borrowers, they survive through Pod's 'borrowing' of items from the 'human beans' who live in the home above the floor. Fourteen-year-old Arrietty (Ah-RIE-et-eeh) Clock lives under the floorboards of a house with her parents, Pod and Homily.

The borrowers 1952