Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and wentout, pulling the door softly closed behind him so as not to wake his mama.  See you, big guy,  Kit said to the lock.  Keep her safe.

I m on it!

He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbingPonch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello.  And you weren t even barking,  Kit said.  Good for you.

She s asleep,Ponch said. Idon t want her to yell at me .

 Neither do I Good for you for thinking of it.

Are we going out !Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.

 Just for a quick look at our guy.I want to see if he s okay before I come barging in on him. We re going to have to be stealthy, though.

Ponchfinished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his  pocket  and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, morecomplex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: Even if someone bumped up against Kit, he would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he d just stumbled somehow. Building the spell had required half an hour scareful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork. The basicspellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.