mie merely smiled her agitating smile. And by and by when
they were alone with their night-light she would start up in bed crying
'Hsh! what was that?' Tony beseeches her, 'It was nothing--don't,
Maimie, don't!' and pulls the sheet over his head. 'It is coming
nearer!' she cries. 'Oh, look at it, Tony! It is feeling your bed
with its horns--it is boring for you, O Tony, oh!' and she desists not
until he rushes downstairs in his combinations, screeching. When they
came up to whip Maimie they usually found her sleeping tranquilly--not
shamming, you know, but really sleeping, and looking like the sweetest
little angel, which seems to me to make it almost worse.

But of course it was daytime when they were in the Gardens, and then
Tony did most of the talking. You could gather from his talk that he
was a very brave boy, and no one was so proud of it as Maimie. She
would have loved to have a ticket on her saying that she was his
sister. And at no time did she admire him more than when he told her,
as he often did with splendid firmness, that one day he meant to remain
behind in the Gardens after the gates were closed.

'O Tony,' she would say with awful respect, 'but the fairies will be so
angry!'

'I dare say,' replied Tony carelessly.

'Perhaps,' she said, thrilling, 'Peter Pan will give you a sail in his
boat!'

'I shall make him,' replied Tony; no wonder she was proud of him.

[Illustration: They all tickled him on the shoulder (missing from book)]

But they should not have talked so loudly, for one day they were
overheard by a fairy who had been gathering skeleton leaves, from which
the little people weave their summer curtains, and after that Tony was
a marked boy. They loosened the rails before he sat on them, so that
down he came on the back of his head; they tripped him up by catching
his bootlace, and bribed the ducks to sink his boat. Nearly all the
nasty accidents you meet with in the Gardens occur because the fairies
have taken an ill-will to you, and so it behoves you to be careful what
you say about them.

Maimie was one of the kind who like to fix a day for doing things, but
Tony was not that kind, and when she asked him which day he was to
remain behind in the Gardens after Lock-out he merely replied, 'Just
some day'; he was quite vague about which day except when she asked,
'Will it be to-day?' and then he could always say for certain that it
would not be to-day. So she saw that he was