"Will you do it?" asked Billie, her eyes blazing at them.
"We will!" they almost shouted, and then rose such a pandemonium that Billie, trying to scream above the noise, found her voice drowned completely.
After a minute they quieted down a little—enough to listen to her, anyway.
"Please don't make so much noise," she begged. "We'll be likely to make our raid a great deal easier if we wait until the cooks are gone and the teachers are in bed. We don't care if we are caught, but we don't want to be caught until after we've had something to eat."
The girls realized the common sense in this, but it was all they could do to be patient and wait. The thought of something to eat—all they wanted to eat—after a week of starvation made them ravenous, furiously impatient of delay.
The time passed at last, however, and when the "lights out" gong sounded through the hall the girls were apparently in bed and fast asleep.
Hardly five minutes had passed before the doors of the different dormitories opened, and the girls crept singly or in twos and threes toward the farther end of the hall until all the hundred-odd girls of Three Towers were gathered there except two. Two of them had stayed behind, and so absorbed were the other girls that they never noticed the absence of Amanda Peabody and Eliza Dilks.
It may be that Rose noticed, for as she left the dormitory she looked over at them and smiled a little. She had guessed at the truth.
For Amanda and Eliza disliked Billie so bitterly that they would even go hungry for the chance of getting even with her. Miss Ada and Miss Cora would be very glad to know who had been the ring-leader in the rebellion!
In the meantime the girls, satisfied that every one was present, had started softly down the back stairs which led them by the shortest way to the kitchen.