The doughty band ran in full retreat to the side of the ship. Jo swung 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.
“I saw you climbing up and once in a while I saw you on deck,” explained Mrs. Seymour.
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!”