Page:Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1912, Hodder & Stoughton).djvu/307

 rather like a bird. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you are only a Betwixt-and-Between.’ But it hurt him so much that she immediately added, ‘It must be a delicious thing to be.’

‘Come and be one, then, dear Maimie,’ he implored her, and they set off for the boat, for it was now very near Open-Gate time. ‘And you are not a bit like a nest,’ he whispered to please her.

‘But I think it is rather nice to be like one,’ she said in a woman’s contradictory way. ‘And, Peter, dear, though I can’t give them my fur, I wouldn’t mind their building in it. Fancy a nest in my neck with little spotty eggs in it! O Peter, how perfectly lovely!’

But as they drew near the Serpentine, she shivered a little, and said, ‘Of course I shall go and see mother often, quite often. It is not as if I was saying good-bye for ever to mother, it is not in the least like that.’

‘Oh no,’ answered Peter, but in his heart he knew it was very like that, and he would have told her so had he not been in a quaking fear of losing her. He was so fond of her, he felt he could not