I had heard of corpse candles, and at last I persuaded myself that this must be a corpse bell tolling of itself at midnight for the dead.

I tolled my bell--how, or how long, I don't know--and ran home to bed as fast as I could touch the ground.
'I was up early next morning after a restless night, and told the story to my neighbours.

Some were serious and some made light of it; I don't think anybody believed it real.

But, that morning, Mr Reuben Haredale was found murdered in his bedchamber; and in his hand was a piece of the cord attached to an alarm-bell outside the roof, which hung in his room and had been cut asunder, no doubt by the murderer, when he seized it.
'That was the bell I heard.
'A bureau was found opened, and a cash-box, which Mr Haredale had brought down that day, and was supposed to contain a large sum of money, was gone.

The steward and gardener were both missing and both suspected for a long time, but they were never found, though hunted far and wide.
And far enough they might have looked for poor Mr Rudge the steward, whose body--scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and ring he wore--was found, months afterwards, at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with a deep gash in the breast where he had been stabbed with a knife.