ich was always to be
open for him.

But the window was closed, and there were iron bars on it, and peering
inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm around
another little boy.

Peter called, 'Mother! mother!' but she heard him not; in vain he beat
his little limbs against the iron bars. He had to fly back, sobbing,
to the Gardens, and he never saw his dear again. What a glorious boy
he had meant to be to her! Ah, Peter! we who have made the great
mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance. But
Solomon was right--there is no second chance, not for most of us. When
we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.

V

THE LITTLE HOUSE

Everybody has heard of the Little House in the Kensington Gardens,
which is the only house in the whole world that the fairies have built
for humans. But no one has really seen it, except just three or four,
and they have not only seen it but slept in it, and unless you sleep in
it you never see it. This is because it is not there when you lie
down, but it is there when you wake up and step outside.

In a kind of way every one may see it, but what you see is not really
it, but only the light in the windows. You see the light after
Lock-out Time. David, for instance, saw it quite distinctly far away
among the trees as we were going home from the pantomime, and Oliver
Bailey saw it the night he stayed so late at the Temple, which is the
name of his father's office. Angela Clare, who loves to have a tooth
extracted because then she is treated to tea in a shop, saw more than
one light, she saw hundreds of them all together; and this must have
been the fairies building the house, for they build it every night, and
always in a different part of the Gardens. She thought one of the
lights was bigger than the others, though she was not quite sure, for
they jumped about so, and it might have been another one that was
bigger. But if it was the same one, it was Peter Pan's light. Heaps
of children have seen the light, so that is nothing. But Maimie
Mannering was the famous one for whom the house was first built.

Maimie was always rather a strange girl, and it was at night that she
was strange. She was four years of age, and in the daytime she was the
ordinary kind. She was pleased when her brother Tony, who was a
magnificent fellow of six, took notice of her, and she looked up to him
in the right way, and tried