He enjoyed a wonderful weekend of kisses and snuggles with Bonnie, knowing that all he had to do was wait until she left him at the boarding house, and then make for his time machine instead of performing the jewellery seeking operation. After that, he would take the time machine back to a period before Bonnie had started at the school, or long after she’d left it, so that he could find the science teacher with no risk of recapture by Bonnie. Not until he’d found a way to restore his size would he go into the era of Bonnie’s time as a student at that school again.

Monday morning came, and he felt both a sadness that his safe window of romance with Bonnie was over, and a relief that he could now escape from her plans to eat him up.

Bonnie got to the school just before classes started, waited until everyone had gone in, and then dropped him off at the dormitory.

“I’ll be slightly late for class, but it was the only way to make sure that nobody saw me bring you in here. I’ll pick you up at lunch time, and you can tell me what you’ve learned about the jewellery.”

“Well, ….enjoy your morning lessons, Bonnie darling,” he said.

He waited until he heard her footsteps tapering off outside the building, and then snuck out, ran across the path, and then started crossing the large lawn. It was a long way to his time machine.

Suddenly he saw Bonnie round the corner in the distance, running frantically, and cross the lawn towards him. She snatched him up and put him in her coat pocket.

“I see you’re not that keen on solving things,” she said, “But I am. I’ll explain later.”

From within her coat pocket, he listened to Bonnie apologizing to her teacher for being late for class.

“I forgot some of my food and had to run back for it,” said Bonnie, with just a slight laugh in her voice, which would have meant nothing to the teacher and her fellow students.

He heard her consistently outthinking her fellow students, calling out all the right answers in all of her lessons, whenever the teachers asked questions. He could only guess at what marvellous machinations of her brilliant brain had prompted Bonnie Kay to make herself even later for her first class for the morning, by racing back to put a stop to his attempts to reach his time machine.

At recess and lunch time, he heard her talking happily with her friends, and came to realise that she was not going to elaborate on what she had said when she had caught him in the school gardens, at least not until she got home.

At the end of the day, she took him home again and sat on her bed.

“Mother’s back in three days, which gives me time to explain something to you and thensome,” said Bonnie, pausing to let the tip of her tongue moisten her lower lip a little.