He remembered what she’d said about her mother being away. The Bonnie of a few years from now had already demonstrated that she tended to take the times of her mother’s absence as a suitable opportunity to eat a little boy in privacy. He knew he had to work fast.

“Oh Bonnie darling, it’s me,” he said suddenly, “Thank you so much for buying me. I tried to come here again a week after our first kiss, but I’m from the future, and my time machine shrank me.”

“Time machine? Do you mean to say that there really is such a thing?”

“There is now, or at least there will be about sixty years from now, when I finish inventing it. I had to keep coming back to see you. I love you, Bonnie.”

“I love you even more like this,” she said, and kissed him slowly.

“Me too,” he said in response, “Your lips were lovely enough before, but when I’m this small, they’re the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever had.”

It was all true. He wasn’t embellishing anything in order to protect himself.

“So from your point of view, you saw me only a week ago?”

“No, it was more like a few weeks. The time machine kept stopping off at other points in your future and needed to be recharged before I could travel again.”

“Did you meet me at those other points?”

“Yes, when you were twenty and twenty-one. You kissed me at twenty too, although you never knew who I was.”

“Do you know from your own time, how long I live for?”

“Into old age. You have a very happy life. Now we can age together.”

“I suppose we could,” she said.

He felt a renewed sense of urgency to sidetrack her mind from its inevitable thoughts.

“I could help you solve mysteries at this size too. Imagine how easy it would be for me to sneak around unseen and ferret out clues for you. The only thing is that you’ll have to take the credit, so that I can be your well kept secret.”

As a light went on in her face, he knew that the idea had scored a touch down.

“I think you could at that. One of the teachers, Miss Leigh, has had her jewellery stolen. As she’s also a house mistress for some of the boarders, she feels sure that the culprit must have been a girl in her charge. You could sneak around in each of the dormitories, while we’re all in class, and look for wherever the jewels have been hidden.”

“I’d be honoured to take on that assignment. I’ll just need your full sized strength to go in and remove the jewels.”

“We don’t want to remove them, just work out where they are,” said Bonnie, “Then I can think of a suitable reason to have Miss Leigh discover the jewellery and incriminate the girl. We’ll do it first thing on Monday.”