Ch. 3 - The Little House

Everybody has heard of the Little House in the Kensington Gardens,
which is the only house in the whole world that the fairies have built
for humans. But no one has really seen it, except just three or four,
and they have not only seen it but slept in it, and unless you sleep
in it you never see it. This is because it is not there when you lie
down, but it is there when you wake up and step outside.

In a kind of way everyone may see it, but what you see is not really
it, but only the light in the windows. You see the light after
Lock-out Time. David, for instance, saw it quite distinctly far away
among the trees as we were going home from the pantomime, and Oliver
Bailey saw it the night he stayed so late at the Temple, which is the
name of his father's office. Angela Clare, who loves to have a tooth
extracted because then she is treated to tea in a shop, saw more than
one light, she saw hundreds of them all together, and this must have
been the fairies building the house, for they build it every night and
always in a different part of the Gardens. She thought one of the
lights was bigger than the others, though she was not quite sure, for
they jumped about so, and it might have been another one that was
bigger. But if it was the same one, it was Peter Pan's light. Heaps
of children have seen the fight, so that is nothing. But Maimie
Mannering was the famous one for whom the house was first built.

Maimie was always rather a strange girl, and it was at night that she
was strange. She was four years of age, and in the daytime she was
the ordinary kind. She was pleased when her brother Tony, who was a
magnificent fellow of six, took notice of her, and she looked up to
him in the right way, and tried in vain to imitate him and was
flattered rather than annoyed when he shoved her about. Also, when
she was batting she would pause though the ball was in the air to
point out to you that she was wearing new shoes. She was quite the
ordinary kind in the daytime.

But as the shades of night fell, Tony, the swaggerer, lost his
contempt for Maimie and eyed her fearfully, and no wonder, for with
dark there came into her face a look that I can describe only as a
leary look. It was also a serene look that contrasted grandly with
Tony's uneasy glances. Then he would make her presents of his
favourite toys (which he always took away from her next morning) and
she accepted them with a disturbing smile. The reason he was now
become so wheedling and she so mysterious was (in brief) that they
knew they were about to be sent to bed. It was then that Maimie was
terrible. Tony entreated her not to do it to-night, and the mother
and their coloured nurse threatened her, but Maimie merely smiled her
agitating smile.