winter greatcoats for John and Michael, with a wet towel round his head
to keep his brain clear, and it seemed a shame to trouble him; besides,
she knew exactly what he would say: 'It all comes of having a dog for a
nurse.'

She decided to roll the shadow up and put it away carefully in a drawer,
until a fitting opportunity came for telling her husband. Ah me!

The opportunity came a week later, on that never-to-be-forgotten
Friday. Of course it was a Friday.

'I ought to have been specially careful on a Friday,' she used to say
afterwards to her husband, while perhaps Nana was on the other side of
her, holding her hand.

'No, no,' Mr. Darling always said, 'I am responsible for it all. I,
George Darling, did it. _Mea culpa, mea culpa._' He had had a classical
education.

They sat thus night after night recalling that fatal Friday, till every
detail of it was stamped on their brains and came through on the other
side like the faces on a bad coinage.

'If only I had not accepted that invitation to dine at 27,' Mrs. Darling
said.

'If only I had not poured my medicine into Nana's bowl,' said Mr.
Darling.

'If only I had pretended to like the medicine,' was what Nana's wet eyes
said.

'My liking for parties, George.'

'My fatal gift of humour, dearest.'

'My touchiness about trifles, dear master and mistress.'

Then one or more of them would break down altogether; Nana at the
thought, 'It's true, it's true, they ought not to have had a dog for a
nurse.' Many a time it was Mr. Darling who put the handkerchief to
Nana's eyes.

'That fiend!' Mr. Darling would cry, and Nana's bark was the echo of it,
but Mrs. Darling never upbraided Peter; there was something in the
right-hand corner of her mouth that wanted her not to call Peter names.

They would sit there in the empty nursery, recalling fondly every
smallest detail of that dreadful evening. It had begun so uneventfully,
so precisely like a hundred other evenings, with Nana putting on the
water for Michael's bath and carrying him to it on her back.

'I won't go to bed,' he had shouted, like one who still believed that he
had the last word on the subject, 'I won't, I won't. Nana, it isn't six
o'clock yet. Oh dear, oh dear, I shan't love you any more, Nana. I tell
you I won't be bathed, I won't, I won't!'

Then Mrs. Darling had come in, wearing her white evening-gown. She had
dressed early because Wendy so loved to see her in her evening-gown,
with the n