Hannah’s Car’lyn, the little child he had learned to love, was somewhere on the ice in the driving storm. He would have rushed blindly out on the rotten ice, barehanded and alone, had the others not halted him. “Hold on! We want a peavy or two—them’s the best tools,” said one of the men. “And a couple of lanterns,” said another. Joseph Stagg stood on the dock and shouted at the top of his voice: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” The wind must have carried his voice a long way out across the cove, but there was no reply. Then, suddenly, the clear silver tone of a bell rang out. Its pitch carried through the storm startlingly clear. “Hullo! what’s the chapel bell tolling for?” demanded the man who had suggested the lanterns. “The boy will hear that!” cried another. “If he isn’t an idiot, he’ll follow the sound of the chapel bell.” “Ya-as,” said the cook, “if the ice ain’t opened up ’twixt him an’ the shore.” There was a movement out in the cove. One field of ice crashed against another. Mr. Stagg stifled a moan and was one of the first to climb down to the level of the ice. “Have a care, Joe,” somebody warned him. “This snow on the ice will mask the holes and fissures something scandalous.” But Joseph Stagg was reckless of his own safety. He started out into the snow, shouting again: “Prince! Prince! Here, boy! Here, boy!” There was no answering bark. The ice cracked and shuddered and the gale slapped the snow against the searchers more fiercely than before. Had they been facing the wind, the snow would fairly have blinded them. “And that’s what’s happened to the boy,” declared one of the men. “Don’t you see? He’s got to face it to get back to town.” “Then he is drifted with it,” said Mr. Stagg hopelessly. “Say, he’ll know which is the right way! Hear that bell?” rejoined another. “You can hear the chapel bell when you’re beating into the cove with the wind dead against you. I know, for I’ve been there.” “Me, too,” agreed another. The clanging of the chapel bell was a comforting sound. Joseph Stagg did not know that, unable to find the sexton, Amanda Parlow had forced the church door and was tugging at the rough rope herself. Back and forth she rang the iron clapper, and it was no uncertain note that clanged across the storm-driven cove that afternoon. It was not work to which Carolyn May’s “pretty lady” was used. Her shoulders soon ached and the palms of her hands were raw and bleeding. But she continued to toll the bell without a moment’s surcease. She did not know how much that resonant sound might mean to those out on the ice—to the little girl and the boy who might have no other means of locating the shore, to the men who were searching for the lost ones; for they, too, might be lost in the storm.