each of them overside in his strong arms and he was the last to leave the wreck. He dropped beside them in the sand.

None of them stopped to look up into the face of the figurehead that towered over them as they ran by. With wings of the wind in their feet they sped up the meadow toward the lights where their suppers were waiting for them.

At supper Mrs. Seymour noticed Helen’s pale tired face. She had grown to expect a certain sort of tiredness in all of the children at night, and this was very different. She looked from one to another of them.

“How did you like playing on the ship?” she asked casually.

“How did you know that we were there?” asked Ann.

78 “I saw you climbing up and once in a while I saw you on deck,” explained Mrs. Seymour.

78

To Ann there was something very reassuring in the thought that all the time they had been on the schooner their mother had been keeping an eye on them; they had been perfectly safe, even when Ann was feeling nervous and fidgety and wanting to look over her shoulder. That was that, thought Ann, “And I’ll never let myself feel the least bit afraid again, when I am on the wreck.”

She could not know that Mrs. Seymour had spent an anxious afternoon. She trusted her husband’s judgment, but sometimes mothers know things without being told, while fathers have to hear reasonable explanations before they can understand the very same things that mothers have known by instinct.

“We had such a lot of fun on the wreck, mother,” said Ann.

“Yes,” said Helen pluckily, “we had lots of fun. You won’t tell us not to go there, will you, mother? Please!”

Ben looked at both the girls as if he wished to remind them of the band’s pledge of secrecy. But he need not have worried. Ann’s determination to solve the mystery unaided by the help of older people was even stouter than his, and Helen had always proved a trustworthy young thing who never gave a secret away.

Ann knew that her mother wanted to hear more about the afternoon; she must explain a part of what79 they were doing. “The band has taken an oath, a strict oath to keep secret everything connected with the wreck—you’ll understand, won’t you, that is why we can’t talk about it more? If you ask us to tell you, of course we will, but we are 

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