ad, I
sympathized with him, and pointed out that it really didn't matter
because I had spoiled it by jabbing my elbow through it. By this time
the kite was out of sight, and we never expected to see or hear of it
again.

* * * * *

A month later a letter came to the Big Half Moon for Father. Jake
Wiggins brought it over in his sloop. Father went off by himself to
read it, and such a queer-looking face as he had when he came back!
His eyes looked as if he had been crying, but that couldn't be, I
suppose, because Claude says men never cry. Anyhow, his face was all
glad and soft and smiley.

"Do you two young pirates and freebooters want to know what has become
of your kite?" he said.

Then he sat down beside us on the rocks at the Mermaid's Pool and told
us the whole story, and read his letter to us. It was the most amazing
thing.

It seems Father had had relations after all--a brother and a sister in
particular. But when he was a young man he quarrelled with his
brother, who didn't treat him very well--but he's been dead for years,
so I won't say a word against him--and had gone away from home. He
never went back, and he never even let them know he was living.

Father says that this was very wrong of him, and I suppose it was,
since he says so; but I don't see how Father could do anything wrong.

Anyway, he had a sister Esther whom he loved very much; but he felt
bitter against her too, because he thought she took his brother's part
too much. So, though a letter of hers, asking him to go back, did
reach him, he never answered it, and he never heard anything more.
Years afterward he felt sorry and went back, but his brother was dead
and his sister had gone away, and he couldn't find out a single thing
about her.

So much for that; and now about the kite. The letter Father had just
received was from his sister, our Aunt Esther and the mother of Dick
and Mimi. She was living at a place hundreds of miles inland. Her
husband was dead and, as we found out later, although she did not say
a word about it in the letter, she was very poor. One day when Dick
and Mimi were out in the woods looking for botany specimens they saw
something funny in the top of a tree. Dick climbed up and got it. It
was a big red kite with a patch on each side and names written on it.
They carried it home to their mother. Dick has since told us that she
turned as pale as the dead when she saw our names on it. You