Jane dropped Dozia’s arm and stepped out to peer after the shadow.  They were scarcely near enough to hear footfalls even had the padding of leaves and heavy grass not actually deadened that possibility.

“Lively ghost!” she whispered.  “Let’s head it off through the grove.”

“But, Jane, it may be some dangerous prowler—­”

“How could he get in here?  Besides we are protected.”  She had the golf club firm in her right hand and seemed to depend on it to lay ghosts or prowlers.  “Come on, Dozia.  Of course that is not a bona fide ghost but it may be the noise maker.”

Dozia followed Jane, although she did hang on to an end of the blue cape and pulled back whenever the darkness seemed too uncertain of penetration.  The little thickets of ornamental evergreens suddenly loomed up into proportions of veritable forests, and every baby Christmas tree was swelled out like a circular blue fir, thick and prickly.

But Jane headed straight as the foliage allowed, across the campus to the magnolia grove, where the eucalyptus trees shot up bare and leafless, ghostly, spectral in the searching moonlight.

A crisp snapping of some dry brambles sent out an alarm from the hedges close to Lenox Hall and the girls listened anxiously.

“Human,” whispered Jane, “and rather dainty.  Hardly a masculine foot to that light touch.  Don’t be alarmed, Dozia.  We are two to one and evidently that other one is a female.”  She said this with assumed confidence, for she feared Dozia might turn and run at any moment.

They were almost in the little grove and it was between there and the boxwood that touched the side porch of Lenox that this hidden thing must be.  Jane was by no means as brave as her carefree manner indicated, and every time she held a bush from brushing Dozia’s face she took occasion to listen intently for vagrant noises.

Stumbling over low underbrush in their rubber soled tennis shoes was not like walking out in the open, and just as Dozia breathed a sigh of relief that the landscape gardening went no further, a wild scream, shrill and piercing, cut the night like an arrow!

Speechless, the girls stood terrified, while the wail seemed to linger suspended somewhere!

“Oh, what was it?” gasped Dozia, but Jane clung to her arm in silence.

The next instant a clanging of chains and rattling of metals broke out from Lenox Hall.

“Quick,” exclaimed Jane, almost dragging her companion forward, “we must locate it, we must reach the dormitory!” But before they could even gain the pathway, the big fire bell pealed out its alarm and; suddenly every window in Lenox Hall blazed with light at a single flash—­the answer of that electric button pressed by the matron, who now swung open the big oaken door and stood summoning her frightened charges to “come out” in the order of fire drill.

“Don’t hurry, be calm!” she called out in the voice of authority, and by now the freshmen who lined the halls and stairways, had recovered their composure and even courage in the face of rescue.