In 1911 Miss Aurelia Quennell arrives at Bellhouse to teach music to forty girls, and to find out what happened to the teacher she is replacing, who was her sister. Bellhouse is a kind school. It says so in the prospectus, the governors repeat it, and the girls have learned to agree. It has a chapel with eight bells and a rule that they are rung only for deaths, which in a school of forty children ought to make them almost silent.