ees, and
hung, clutching the little dog, staring over a level verge where the
balustrade had run--she saw Lisbon fall askew, this way and that: the
roofs collapsing, like a toy structure of cards. Still the roar of
it swelled on the ear; yet, strange to say, the roar seemed to have
nothing to do with the collapse, which went on piecemeal, steadily,
like a game. The crescendo was drowned in a sharper roar and a crash
close behind her--a crash that seemed the end of all 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
house-front, 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 sw