There were two events coming up, as the term drew to an end: the simultaneous lady teachers and men teachers parties, of which Frances was hosting the one for the ladies.

Frances Woodfield now had her replacement shrinking device, with the help of her closest friend Colleen, whom she visited sometimes in giantland. She had been asking a number of boys at the school if they would like to be her third Dollipop. (See Book 1 chapter 41-46 again, if you’ve read so much since, that like me, you’ve almost forgotten why she called Dollipop 1 and 2 such names.)

Nobody had been willing to be shrunken permanently. So she had mentioned the device’s reverse setting, and found that three with crushes on her would be prepared to be shrunken temporarily and then restored in the future. proposed to one, that she could reduce his size indefinitely, and restore it in the future. Then she chose the one of the three who had been recently orphaned. He was now a boarding school student, funded by his parents’ legacy, and was coinicidentally named Francis. He had chosen to stay on at that particular school, because he had been fascinated with continuing Miss Corlani’s time travel class, largely in part because he had been fascinated in Miss Corlani. His crush on Miss Corlani was stronger than his crush on Miss Woodfield, but he also wanted his size eventually restored, so that he could use one of her time techniques. It seemed meant to be. So Frances adopted Francis first, in order to enable him to live with her and be reduced and restored on regular occasions without arousing any suspicion caused by absence from school.

One Saturday afternoon, when he was at full size, he completed work on a hitherto unused method of time travel taught by Miss Corlani: The Time Projector. This device had a wrist attachment, which was a miniature remote control, that could project a person into another time, and then send a retrieval signal through time and space itself to instruct the projector to bring the time traveller back. The projector machine itself actually never left the present. Francis was understandably keen to give it a try.

He went to the chemist, bought a blond hair dye to disguise his brown hair, went home and applied it, put on the wrist remote, then had Miss Woodfield shrink him, and then sent himself back to a time when Miss Colleen Balfour was still a teacher at the school only weeks before she left. He didn’t cross the period affected by the Ring of Reversal, but arrived not long after it had ended. He was now occupying his own timeline in two aspects, shrunken before he started time travelling, rather than by the dispersal of the reduction energy in the period which had been altered by the Ring of Reversal. He had arrived just after school, and waited in the garden bed on one of the school’s paths, until he saw his younger self (who had not yet been orphaned) heading home. Then he waited for Colleen.