things.. The house! She had not thought of the house. Turning, she faced a cloud of dust, and above it saw, before the dust stung her eyes, half-blinding her, that the whole front of the villa had fallen outwards. It had, in fact, fallen and spread its ruin within two yards of her feet. Had the terrace been by that much narrower, she must have been destroyed. As it was, above the dust, she gazed, unhurt, into a house from which the front screen had been sharply caught away, as a mask snatched from a face.

By this the horror had become a dream to her. As in a dream she saw one of her servants-a poor little under-housemaid, rise to her knees from the floor where she had been flung, totter to the edge of the housefront, and stand, piteously gazing down over a height impossible to leap.

A man's voice shouted. Around the corner of the house, from the stables, Mr. Langton came running, by a bare moment escaping death from a mass of masonry that broke from the parapet, and crashed to the ground close behind his heels.

"Lady Vyell! Where is Lady Vyell?”

Ruth called to him, and he scrambled towards her over the gaping pavement. He called as he came, but she could distinguish no words, for within the last few seconds another and different sound had grown on the ear-more terrible even than the first roar of ruin.

"My God! look!" He was at her side, shouting in her ear, for a wind like a gale was roaring past them down from the hills. With one hand he steadied her against it, lest it should blow her over the verge. His other pointed out over Tagus.

She stared. She did not comprehend; she only saw that a stroke more awful than any was falling, or about to fall. The first convulsion had lifted the river bed, leaving the anchored ships high and dry. Some lay canted almost on their beam ends. As the bottom sank again they slowly righted, but too late; for the mass of water, flung to the opposite shore, and hurled back from it, came swooping with a refluent wave, that even from this high hillside was seen to be monstrous. It fell on their decks, drowning and smothering: their masts only were visible above the smother, some pointing firmly, others tottering and breaking. Some rose no more. Others, as the great wave passed on, lurched up into sight again, broken, dismasted, wrenched from their moorings, spinning about aimlessly, tossed like corks amid the spume; and still, its crest arching, its deep note gathering, the great wave came on straight for the harbour quay.

Ruth and Langton, staring down on this portent, did not witness the end; for a dense cloud of dust, on this upper side dun-coloured against the sunlight, interposed itself between them and the city, over which it made a total darkness. Into that darkness the

great wave passed and broke; and almost in the moment of its breaking a second tremor shook the hillside. Then, indeed, wave and earthquake together made universal roar, drowning the last cry of thousands; for before it died away earthquake and wave together had turned the harbour quay of Lisbon bottom up, and engulfed it. Of all the population huddled there to escape from death in the falling streets, not a corpse ever rose to the surface of Tagus.

But Ruth saw nothing of this. She clung to Langton, and his arm was about her. She believed, with so much of her mind as was not paralysed, that the end of the world was come.

As the inferna hubbub died away on the dropping wind, she glanced back over her shoulder at the house. The poor little criada-moca was no longer there, peering over the edge she dared not leap. Nay, the house was no longer there only three gaunt walls, and between them a heap where rooms, floors, roof had collapsed together.

Of a sudden complete silence fell about them. As her eyes travelled along the edge of the terrace where the balustrade had run, but ran no longer, she had a sensation of standing on the last brink of the world, high over nothingness. Langton's arm still supported her.

"As safe here as anywhere," she heard him saying. "For the chance that led you here, thank whatever Gods may be."

"But I must find him!" she cried.

"Eh? Noll?-find Noll? Dear lady, small chance of that!"

"I must find him."

"He was to attend High Mass in the Cathedral-” "Yes . . with that woman. What help could such an one bring to him if-if- Oh, I must find him, I say."

"The Cathedral," he repeated. "You are brave; let your own eyes look for it." He had withdrawn

his arm.

"Yet I must search, and you shall search with me. You were his friend, I think?"

"Indeed, I even believed so. . . . I was thinking It is almost certain death. Do you say

of you.
that he is worth it?"

"Do you fear death?” she asked.

"Moderately," he answered. "Yet if you command

me, I come; if you go, I go with you."

"Come."

CHAPTER IV

THE SEARCH

THEY set out hand in hand. The small dog ran with them.

Even the beginning of the descent was far from easy, for the high walls that had protected the villagardens of Buenos Ayres lay in heaps, cumbering the roadway, and in places obliterating it.

About a hundred and fifty yards down the road, by what had been the walled entrance to the Hakes' garden, they sighted two forlorn small figures-the six and five year old Hake children, Sophie and Miriam, who recognised Ruth and, running, clung to her skirts. "Mamma! Where is mamma?"

"Dears, where did you leave her last?"

"She pushed us out through the gateway, here, and told us to stand in the middle of the road while she ran back to call daddy. She said no stones could fall on us here. But she has been gone ever so long, and we can't hear her calling at all.”

While Ruth gathered them to her and attempted to console them, Mr. Langton stepped within the ruined