This time it was Ann and her father who exchanged a quick glance, a flash of understanding and satisfaction. Impulsively Ann threw her arms around her mother’s neck and kissed her. Her mother should have a chance to rest here, if Ann’s help could make it possible, dear mother who still looked so pale and tired after the long weeks of nursing Helen and bringing her back to health.

“I knew that you’d like the Baileys,” said Mr. Seymour.

“Jo is an unusually nice boy, isn’t he, father?” Ann had already grown attached to him.

“He certainly is,” Mr. Seymour agreed heartily. “And I know that you will like him even better as you become better acquainted. His father couldn’t get along without Jo. He does a man’s work on27 the farm and helps bring in the lobsters every morning.”

27

“I’m going to be just like him,” Ben called from his bed in the next room. Jo’s sturdy strength and the simple unconscious way the boy used it had fired Ben’s imagination.

“Nothing could make me happier than to have you as well and strong as he is, when we go away next fall,” answered Mr. Seymour.

With supper and the lamplight and the homely charm of the old house, the atmosphere of uncanny strangeness had vanished, but after Ann had blown out her lamp, just before she was ready to climb the steps to her bed, she went to the window and peered through the darkness toward the wrecked ship.

And as she looked a flickering light passed across the deck.

She must be mistaken. It was a firefly. No, there it was again, as though a man walked carrying a swinging lantern with its wick no bigger than a candle flame. He passed the bow, and the glow swung across the figure of the demon.

Was it Jo or his father? That was Ann’s first thought, but she wanted to make sure. From a second window in her room, across a corner, she could see the windows of the barn which the Baileys had made into a living room, and she leaned far out to see clearly. Jo was there. He was talking to some one at the back of the room.

28 If Jo and his father were talking together, who could be prowling around the boat? She crossed the room to look again at the schooner. And as she watched, the bright pin prick of light disappeared; the lantern had been carried behind some opaque object that hid it.

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