the kennel?'

'John,' Wendy said falteringly, 'perhaps we don't remember the old life
as well as we thought we did.'

A chill fell upon them; and serve them right.

'It is very careless of mother,' said that young scoundrel John, 'not to
be here when we come back.'

It was then that Mrs. Darling began playing again.

'It's mother!' cried Wendy, peeping.

'So it is!' said John.

'Then are you not really our mother, Wendy?' asked Michael, who was
surely sleepy.

'Oh dear!' exclaimed Wendy, with her first real twinge of remorse, 'it
was quite time we came back.'

'Let us creep in,' John suggested, 'and put our hands over her eyes.'

But Wendy, who saw that they must break the joyous news more gently,
had a better plan.

'Let us all slip into our beds, and be there when she comes in, just as
if we had never been away.'

And so when Mrs. Darling went back to the night-nursery to see if her
husband was asleep, all the beds were occupied. The children waited for
her cry of joy, but it did not come. She saw them, but she did not
believe they were there. You see, she saw them in their beds so often in
her dreams that she thought this was just the dream hanging around her
still.

She sat down in the chair by the fire, where in the old days she had
nursed them.

They could not understand this, and a cold fear fell upon all the three
of them.

'Mother!' Wendy cried.

'That's Wendy,' she said, but still she was sure it was the dream.

'Mother!'

'That's John,' she said.

'Mother!' cried Michael. He knew her now.

'That's Michael,' she said, and she stretched out her arms for the
three little selfish children they would never envelop again. Yes, they
did, they went round Wendy and John and Michael, who had slipped out of
bed and run to her.

'George, George,' she cried when she could speak; and Mr. Darling woke
to share her bliss, and Nana came rushing in. There could not have been
a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who
was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other
children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the
one joy from which he must be for ever barred.

CHAPTER XVII

WHEN WENDY GREW UP

I hope you want to know what became of the other boys. They were waiting
below to give Wendy time to explain about them; and when they had
counted five hundred they went up. They went up by the stair, because
they thought th