Eben became fully absorbed in telling his story.

"I was walking through that park once, towards the end of a day, without a dollar to my name, and not in the least concerned. I saw a scarf on the park bench, and then a sweet teenage girl called out that it belonged to her. We sat down and started talking. She had a delicate feminine quality that's rare in any time, especially the 1930s. I think I subconsciously wished even that day, that she was an adult. Her conversation moved me, with the simplest of subject matter, just because of the gentle way she spoke, and the positive outlook she had on every aspect of life. She believed in the one true God in a time when so many people have been conditioned by the secular entertainment industry to dismiss Him as myth. The funny thing was that she said her parents were (as in present tense at the time of my meeting her) high wire trapeze artists at Hammersteins. Yet I knew Hammersteins had been torn down years before. Hours later, when I was talking to Gus, he noticed that the newspaper which had wrapped her scarf was dated 1910. Yet it was the 1930s. The paper looked as if it had been printed that day. No aging, no tears in it, no stains."

"Do you mean that this girl was somehow out of time?"

"It took me a long time to get a grasp on that concept, and I doubt that Spinney's ever really believed me about that, but she must have been."

"You won't find my story nearly so disappointing as you thought," said Elise.

"I wouldn't have been disappointed. I just doubted that you'd believe mine," said Eben, "Days later I saw Jennie again in the park. But she was a few years older, and talking of different people in her life: a different teenage friend than the Cecily Brown she'd first mentioned, and other differences too. In between our second and third meetings, I checked out Hammersteins, to confirm it had indeed been replaced by the Rialto, met a few old staff and learned how Jennie's parents had died. Then I saw her again crying in the park, grieving as though it had just happened …. because to her, it had. She was being drawn into the 1930s from various points in her youth. I think in real time, had she lived, she'd have been older than me. If she was in her early teens in 1910, and I wasn't born until then … but it wouldn't have mattered to me. Anyway, I kept seeing her now and then, whenever she'd mysteriously appear. The long waits were the best and worst times of my life. At least for once, I had someone to wait for. She'd asked me to wait, for her to grow up… said she was hurrying. Then she was grown up, and I did the portrait. The whole world was oblivious to the time we spent together on those nights, and then the hustle and bustle outside would start up in her absence, and I just wanted to hide away from it until she returned. She said she'd be going away for summer to visit a sick relative, and that after that we'd be together forever. While she was a way, I visited the convent where she'd once taken me. I realise now, that she'd somehow taken me back to the past, to her real time, on that one day, when her friends were taking the veil. Every other meeting we had must have involved her coming to my time. She never seemed to notice how modern things must have looked, when she was with me, possibly because it was almost always at night. I never thought about that before. While I was at the convent, an elderly sister who'd once known Jennie told me that she had died out at Lands End Light on October 5th, but 20 years earlier. I knew that the time differential between Jennie and me had been somehow overlooked in all of our meetings. Would it be overlooked now, when she so desperately needed to be saved? I headed out, bought a boat and reached the lighthouse ahead of her, saw her sailing in on a small boat … and lost her. It was like she didn't even understand the danger of dying at sea. She promised we'd be together, but all I've done is mourn her ever since, and until you came along, I couldn't paint another meaningful portrait. I don't know why you brought my artistic sense to life again, but you did."

"I know why," said Elise, "It's because I lost my Richard through an error of time too."

"Error of time! That's what Jennie said, when the wave was coming towards the rocks. She said that time had made an error, that we were lonely and unloved until we met each other. She was probably harking back to an earlier more peaceful talk, when I'd asked her if we could have met and loved others in other times, and she'd said that we were only made for each other."

"Like Richard and me. He turned up at my seaside hotel, not long after the real time from which your teenaged Jennie first came," said Elise, "He was insistent on spending time with me, incredibly handsome, humorous in a slightly self-deprecating way, and not always as self assured as he should have been. Despite the constant controlling interference of my agent, Richard Collier persuaded me to spend time with him. We fell in love, and my agent arranged for Richard to be assaulted and left for dead on the lawn. I dismissed my agent and found Richard, and had lunch with him on the floor of a hotel room … his or mine, I don't remember. He told me the most amazing story of how he'd been visited by my elderly self in 1972, at a party soon after he graduated from college. Apparently, all I had said to him was 'Come back to me.'."

"1972. That's 22 years away, even now," said Eben.

"He saw old photographs of me, from your Jennie's time, I'm guessing," in 1980, when he was suffering a similar artistic block to the ones you've alluded to in our earlier talks," said Elise, "Richard consulted his old university professor, who had once talked about a possible technique for time travel by hypnosis. The professor had told him to remove every aspect of 1980 from his presence before attempting time travel. So he obtained old currency, an old suit and had his hair styled in the manner of men of my time period. He went to the same seaside hotel at which I had stayed in my youth, looked at the guest book archives and found his own signature from the same time that I was there. The time paradox had confirmed to him that he would succeed in time travelling back to meet me. Back then the very concepts he was talking about had me convinced that he might be a little deluded, possibly mentally ill, but that took nothing away from his charm or his appeal to me. Then, his story was proved beyond all doubt, just as I lost him. We were laughing and joking and then he felt something in the inner pocket of his coat, and took out a coin. He looked at the date in horror. It was dated 1979. He must have instantly remembered the professor's warning about removing all present objects before attempting time travel. As he was pulled through some white void before my very eyes, and then the hotel room returned to normal (but without Richard Collier), he must have found that the coin was some sort of lodestone which drew him back to 1980. Whether he tried to come back again, I don't know. I never saw him again."

"That's what was in your eyes!" said Eben, "When you first came to me, I mean. You faced a similar loss, caused by a similar trick of time travel, and it came across in your eyes. You don't know how good it's been to share my story with someone who understands, who has every reason to believe it."

"And you believe mine," said Elise, "I never married, possibly never will."

"If only this hypnotism trick could take me back to before Jennie died, so I could try again," said Eben.

"You'd already be there, from the last time you went back. That doesn't seem right, or that it would work, even with the way the laws of time have been bent in our special cases," said Elise, "But maybe we could alter each other's outcomes."

Chapter End notes: "Where I come, from nobody knows.

Where I am going, everyone goes."

(sung by Jennie Appleton in "Portrait of Jennie".)