“It’s that bell again,” said Arden unnecessarily. She stood holding firmly to a leg of the chicken while Sim dug her fingers into the soft browned flesh beneath a wing. They laughed over it later, of course. But just now terror gripped them.
Terry was holding the pies so tightly in her fright that her fingers punctured the crust and went messily into the fruit beneath. They all stood like children who had been playing “statues”; in just the positions they had assumed when that ghostly bell began to toll.
It stopped for a moment and then began to peal again, if anything more loudly than at first. Then the girls came back to life, and while it was still clanging the second time, Arden had presence of mind enough to close the refrigerator door, to stave off discovery as long as possible if the authorities entered the kitchen. Then, with the other girls, who were also holding to the food they had captured, Arden ran to the low windows on the north side of the kitchen. They all crowded close to the glass casement and peered out into the night. The bell sounded more clearly from this vantage point.
“Who can be ringing it?” murmured Jane. “I hate bells or whistles in the night. It always seems so—ghostly!”
“Stop it!” someone implored.
“I’d like to run around outside and find out about it,” declared Terry. “Of course, it must be someone pulling the rope. Bells don’t ring of themselves.”
“Maybe the wind,” suggested Mary Todd.
“The wind couldn’t ring that old bell,” declared Arden. “It’s too heavy to be swayed by what little breeze there is tonight. And it’s high up on the wall, under a sort of canopy. No, someone pulled that rope.”
“But the rope is high up, out of reach from the ground,” said Sim who had noticed that fact.
Puzzled, alarmed, and in momentary fear of being discovered in the midnight raid, the girls stood at the window. It was in a sort of extension of the building and faced the north, so that from it a view could be had of the rear college grounds leading down to the orchard.