Chapter 17 - Page 2

but Maimie merely smiled her agitating smile.
And by-and-by when they were alone with their night-light she
would start up in bed crying "Hsh! what was that?" Tony
beseeches her! "It was nothing--don't, Maimie, don't!" and pulls
the sheet over his head. "It is coming nearer!" she cries; "Oh,
look at it, Tony! It is feeling your bed with its horns--it is
boring for you, oh, Tony, oh!" and she desists not until he
rushes downstairs in his combinations, screeching. When they
came up to whip Maimie they usually found her sleeping
tranquilly, not shamming, you know, but really sleeping, and
looking like the sweetest little angel, which seems to me to make
it almost worse.

But of course it was daytime when they were in the Gardens, and
then Tony did most of the talking. You could gather from his
talk that he was a very brave boy, and no one was so proud of it
as Maimie. She would have loved to have a ticket on her saying
that she was his sister. And at no time did she admire him more
than when he told her, as he often did with splendid firmness,
that one day he meant to remain behind in the Gardens after the
gates were closed.

"Oh, Tony," she would say, with awful respect, "but the fairies
will be so angry!"

"I daresay," replied Tony, carelessly.

"Perhaps," she said, thrilling, "Peter Pan will give you a sail
in his boat!"

"I shall make him," replied Tony; no wonder she was proud of him.

But they should not have talked so loudly, for one day they were
overheard by a fairy who had been gathering skeleton leaves, from
which the little people weave their summer curtains, and after
that Tony was a marked boy. They loosened the rails before he
sat on them, so that down he came on the back of his head; they
tripped him up by catching his boot-lace and bribed the ducks to
sink his boat. Nearly all the nasty accidents you meet with in
the Gardens occur because the fairies have taken an ill-will to
you, and so it behoves you to be careful what you say about them.

Maimie was one of the kind who like to fix a day for doing
things, but Tony was not that kind, and when she asked him which
day he was to remain behind in the Gardens after Lock-out he
merely replied, "Just some day;" he was quite vague about which
day except when she asked "Will it be to-day?" and then he could
always say for certain that it would not be to-day. So she saw
that he was waiting for a real good chance.

This brings us to an afternoon when the Gardens were white with
snow, and there was ice on the Round Pond, not thick enough to
skate on but at least you could spoil it for