"She can sleep," he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more was black, the stars shut out.
Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one, crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed, tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the walls was of no account.
He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief necessities.
"My shoes, my money."
He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes, and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the cashier of R. C. Royle & Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook, slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now, and flung the door open.
"Doris," he cried, and no answer was returned to him.
"Doris," he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered him from her cot.
He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She was wide-awake all the time.
"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake. The house is falling."
She replied in a strange, quiet voice: