“Jo just called me,” whispered Ben. “He wants to know whether we would like to go after lobsters with him. He says it is going to be a fine day and not too rough for landlubbers like us.”

Would she like to go? Well, rather! Jo had promised that he would take them some fine day when the swell on the water was not too heavy. The Baileys, either Jo or his father, made a daily trip out through their lobster string, which was set beyond the pond rocks and Douglas Head in the wide expanse of the sea. Jo had decided that Helen had better not go as she was still so frail that if she grew dizzy and ill out there probably she would have to go to bed for the rest of the day. And as she would be grief-stricken if she knew that she was82 being left behind the others arranged to go some day without letting her know anything about it.

82

Ann’s room was just light enough for her to see her way without lighting a lamp. She had not realized that the night faded so slowly just before the sun rose, for she never had been up so early in all her life. The small clock on the chest of drawers pointed to half past one. She could hear Ben moving about in his room, scurrying into his clothes with a sound like the little scramblings of a squirrel.

They found Jo waiting for them by the kitchen steps with a lighted lantern in his hand.

“Probably we won’t need this after we get across the meadow and strike the road,” explained Jo, “but now it will be easier going with a light to shine and show up the bumps. Dawn is coming pretty fast now.”

He struck off down the sloping meadow, going across it diagonally in such a way as to give the wreck a wide berth. Ann realized that he deliberately chose the rougher ground of the field in preference to walking along the road, merely because of that ship waiting to draw their thoughts into her shadows. Ann had no desire to peer into the grinning face of the demon in the half-light of the pale dawn. She still had a vivid recollection of its leer the first time she had seen it in the gathering shadows of dusk. And dawn is exactly like the dusk in its power to make things look different from the way they really are.

83 “I’m glad we’re not going past the boat,” Ben murmured heartily in her ear, and she nodded in sympathy.

83

The cove lay at the mouth of the swamp river and was only a short walk from the road at the end of the meadow. Jo swung into a swift 

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