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Billie Bradley and Her Classmates: or, The Secret of the Locked Tower
Billie Bradley and Her Classmates; Or, The Secret of the Locked Tower
CHAPTER I – THIN ICE
Click! click! click! went three pairs of skates as three snugly-dressed girls fairly flew along the frozen surface of the lake.
“Isn’t it glorious?” cried the laughing, brown-eyed one, who was no other than Billie Bradley, as she threw back her head and sniffed the crisp, cold air. “Who ever heard of the lake freezing over in the middle of November? And the ice is pretty solid, too.”
“In spots,” added Violet Farrington, a slender, dark girl with black hair and dark eyes.
“What do you mean – ‘in spots’?” asked the third of the trio, Laura Jordon. Laura was as fair as Violet was dark, and now her blue eyes darted an anxious glance at her chum. “Do you think we shall find any thin ice?”
“I don’t know, of course,” Violet answered quickly. “But you notice Miss Walters told us to stay close to the shore, and that certainly looks as if she weren’t any too certain about the ice.”
Miss Walters was the much-loved principal of Three Towers Hall, the boarding school which the girls were attending, and to the three chums, Miss Walters’ word was law.
As Billie Bradley had said, Lake Molata, upon which Three Towers Hall was situated, had frozen over unusually early this year. Though it was not quite the middle of November, there had been several rather heavy snowfalls. The thermometer had fallen lower and lower till it had dropped below the freezing point, and after a few days of this falling weather a thin glaze of ice had begun to form over the still surface of the lake.
At first the girls had not been too joyful, fearing that the ice was too fragile to last and that one good thaw would do away with it entirely.
But the thaw had not come, and as day after day the prematurely cold weather continued, the girls at the Hall had grown more and more excited. Finally they could stand it no longer and dispatched a committee of three to Miss Walters – among whom had been Billie – asking for the unique privilege of skating over the frozen surface of Lake Molata in the middle of November.
The petition had been granted, with the reservation, as Vi had said, that the girls should stay close to shore and not venture out into the uncertain center of the lake.