That was the story, and they were as pleased with it as the fair narrator herself. Everything just as it should be, you see. Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time; and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be embraced instead of smacked.

So great indeed was their faith in a mother’s love that they felt they could afford to be callous for a bit longer.

But there was one there who knew better; and when Wendy finished he uttered a hollow groan.

‘What is it, Peter?’ she cried, running to him, thinking he was ill. She felt him solicitously, lower down than his chest. ‘Where is it, Peter?’

‘It isn’t that kind of pain,’ Peter replied darkly.

‘Then what kind is it?’

‘Wendy, you are wrong about mothers.’

They all gathered round him in affright, so alarming was his agitation; and with a fine candour he told them what he had hitherto concealed.

‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘I thought like you that my mother would always keep the window open for me; so I stayed away for moons and moons and moons, and then flew back; but the window was barred, for mother had forgotten all about me, and there was another little boy sleeping in my bed.’

I am not sure that this was true, but Peter thought it was true; and it scared them.

‘Are you sure mothers are like that?’

‘Yes.’

So this was the truth about mothers. The toads!

Still it is best to be careful; and no one knows so quickly as a child when he should give in. ‘Wendy, let us go home,’ cried John and Michael together.

‘Yes,’ she said, clutching them.

‘Not tonight?’ asked the lost boys, bewildered. They knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t.

‘At once,’ Wendy replied resolutely, for the horrible thought had come to her: ‘Perhaps mother is in half- mourning by this time.’

This dread made her forgetful of what must be Peter’s feelings, and she said to him rather sharply, ‘Peter, will you make the necessary arrangements?’

‘If you wish it,’ he replied, as coolly as if she had asked him to pass the nuts.

Not so much as a sorry-to-lose-you between them! If she did not mind the parting, he was going to show her, was Peter, that neither did he.

But of course he cared very much; and he was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who, as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland that every time you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off vindictively as fast as possible.