‘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.