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.

XVII. 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 everyone 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 in vain to imitate him and was flattered
rather than annoyed when he shoved her about. Also, when she was batting
she would pause though the ball was in the air to point out to you
that she was wearing new shoes. She was quite the ordinary kind in the
daytime.

But as the shades of night fell, Tony, the swaggerer, lost his contempt
for Maimie and eyed