The axle of the old bell groaned and shrieked at each revolution. Miss Amanda pulled on the rope desperately. She did not think to put her foot in the loop of the rope to aid her in this work. With the power of her arms and shoulders alone she brought the music from the throat of the bell. Every stroke was a shock that racked her body terribly. She dared not leave the rope for a minute while she called from the door for help. She hoped the sexton would come, wondering who was so steadily pulling the bell rope. Stroke followed stroke. The axle shrieked—and she could have done the same with pain had she not set her teeth in her lip and put forth every atom of will power she possessed to keep to the work and stifle her agony. On and on, till her brain swam, and her breath came chokingly from her lungs. Once she missed the stroke, her strength seeming to desert her for the moment. Frantically she clawed at the rope again and pulled down on it with renewed desperation. “I will! I will!” she gasped. Why? For the sake of the little child that she, too, had learned to love? Perhaps. And, yet, it was not the flowerlike face of little Carolyn May that Amanda Parlow saw continually before her eyes as she tugged on the bell rope with bleeding hands. Going out into the storm, out on the treacherous ice, was a figure that she had watched during the long years from behind the curtains of her front room. It was the most familiar figure in the world to her. She had seen it change from a youthful, willowy shape to a solid, substantial, middle-aged figure during these years. She had seen it aging before its time. No wonder she could visualise it now so plainly out there on the ice. “Joe! Joe!” she muttered each time that she bore down on the bell rope, and the iron tongue shouted the word for her, far across the snow-blotted cove. CHAPTER XXII—CHET GORMLEY’S AMBITION Carolyn May was not the first of the trio caught out on the moving ice to be frightened. Perhaps because she had such unbounded faith in the good intentions of everybody towards her, the child could not imagine anything really hurting her. That is, excepting wildcats. Carolyn May was pretty well convinced that they did not like little girls. “Oh, isn’t this fun!” she crowed, bending her head before the beating of the storm. “Do hang on, Princey.” But Prince could not hang on so well, now that they faced the wind. He slipped off the sled twice, and that delayed them. Under his skates, Chet could feel the ice heave, while the resonant cracks followed each other like a file-fire of musketry. “Goodness me!” gasped Carolyn May, “the ice seems to be going all to pieces, Chet. I hope it won’t till we get back to the shore.” “I’m hopin’ that, too,” returned the boy. He had quickly realised that they were in peril, but he would not let Carolyn May see that he was frightened—no, indeed! But he had to give up trying to make Prince sit on the sled.