He did not know the tune, which was ‘Home, Sweet Home’, but he knew it was saying, ‘Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy’; and he cried exultantly, ‘You will never see Wendy again, lady, for the window is barred.’

He peeped in again to see why the music had stopped; and now he saw that Mrs Darling had laid her head on the box, and that two tears were sitting on her eyes.

‘She wants me to unbar the window,’ thought Peter, ‘but I won’t, not I.’

He peeped again, and the tears were still there, or another two had taken their place.

‘She’s awfully fond of Wendy,’ he said to himself. He was angry with her now for not seeing why she could not have Wendy.

The reason was so simple: ‘I’m fond of her too. We can’t both have her, lady.’

But the lady would not make the best of it, and he was unhappy. He ceased to look at her, but even then she would not let go of him. He skipped about and made funny faces, but when he stopped it was just as if she were inside him, knocking.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said at last, and gulped. Then he unbarred the window. ‘Come on, Tink,’ he cried, with a frightful sneer at the laws of nature; ‘we don’t want any silly mothers’; and he flew away.

Thus Wendy and John and Michael found the window open for them after all, which of course was more than they deserved. They alighted on the floor, quite unashamed of themselves; and the youngest one had already forgotten his home.

‘John,’ he said, looking around him doubtfully, ‘I think I have been here before.’

‘Of course you have, you silly. There is your old bed.’

‘So it is,’ Michael said, but not with much conviction.

‘I say,’ cried John, ‘the kennel!’ and he dashed across to look into it.

‘Perhaps Nana is inside it,’ Wendy said.

But John whistled. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘there’s a man inside it.’

‘It’s father!’ exclaimed Wendy.

‘Let me see father,’ Michael begged eagerly, and he took a good look. ‘He is not so big as the pirate I killed,’ he said with such frank disappointment that I am glad Mr Darling was asleep; it would have been sad if those had been the first words he heard his little Michael say.

Wendy and John had been taken aback somewhat at finding their father in the kennel.

‘Surely,’ said John, like one who had lost faith in his memory, ‘he used not to sleep in 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.