Her hand closed around the outside of the machine, just as it vanished from her grip. He adjusted the geographic instruments while in time transit, to make sure that he ended up in the school gardens, rather than in Bonnie’s backyard again. His only hope, of ever being romantically involved with Bonnie’s beautiful mouth at a safe size, was to find a school science teacher who might be able to help both him and his time machine to regain their normal sizes. When he reached the school gardens, he saw that he had almost gone back as far as he had originally intended to. Bonnie would now be sixteen years old.

From the intensity of the sunlight, he imagined that it would be about eight in the morning, One thing had taken him pleasantly by surprise. There was a house at the edge of the garden, and he was now the right size to walk in and decide what to do next, since he would no longer need to find a science teacher. He couldn’t simply take off in the time machine again, as it may well reduce his size again, given the erratic nature of its recent performances in the time stream. The house was probably one of the school boarding houses, which he’d not seen clearly on the night of the formal. The front door was open. So he walked in, hoping that he would not be construed as a criminal trespasser.

There didn’t seem to be anybody in the first room, and he tried a few more, before he heard footsteps outside. Suddenly the house seemed to rise into the air, and he peeked out the window and saw that a huge woman had picked up the house.

He came to understand that he had not regained his normal size, but was in fact now in a Dollshouse. The woman placed it down on a huge table at a stall, and he looked out and saw an “old wares” sign on the table.

Looking around, he saw stalls everywhere. It was that Friday of the school year, which Bonnie had written about in her book, when all of the mothers ran a school fete, and the girls were given longer recess breaks and the afternoon free of classes in order to really enjoy he fete. The woman would probably sell the Dollshouse, and him with it.

Then another factor became apparent to him, one so unequivocable in its certainty, that it haunted him to the very core of his being. The outside walls of the Dollshouse were white, but other than that, it looked exactly like the dark brown Dollshouse that he had seen at the garage sale in his own time, when the host had told him that the Dollshouse and mansion had once belonged to Bonnie Kay and her widowed mother.

“This must be the day that she bought the Dollshouse!” he thought, “It’s an inviolate event in history, and she’ll buy it today, with me inside it.”