No answer came, and Pattie turned her head, to find that her father had left the room. He called, after a moment, from the passage,—"I'll be back in five minutes. Just going out on the roof to take a look." There was easy exit, Pattie knew, by means of steps and a good trap-door; but it seemed to her unnecessary trouble. She remained where she was, glad to be able to rest; and silence followed. The door of her room was wide open, and the trap-door also. Suddenly a shout in her father's voice startled her. Something in the tone seemed to portend disaster, and a cold shock of fear went through the girl. She did not catch any words, it was the tone only which alarmed her; and she would have sprung up to go to him, but there was not time. She was seated in a somewhat cramped position on the sill, her feet inside, her face turned the other way. Till that instant she had been looking down the road. Afterwards she never could recall exactly what happened next. She was vaguely conscious of a whirl of noise and confusion, everything about her seeming to give way together, while she herself remained where she was. She had, indeed, no power to stir. A numbness seized her limbs, a kind of paralysis overwhelmed her, as the flooring of the room sank away, together with the whole opposite wall and part of the two side walls. Only the front wall of the house, which held the window in which she sat, and parts of the side walls, stood firm. The greater part of the house was gone, collapsing into some large hollow below. Of the roof hardly a trace could be seen; and with the roof was gone Mr. Dale, who had been standing on it. Pattie found herself left behind, seated on the sill, with no flooring beneath her feet; a tumult of terror and agony surging in her brain. CHAPTER III Mrs. Anthony Cragg "WHEREVER are you off to now, I wonder?" demanded Mrs. Cragg. "Business, my dear." "That's something new. I thought you always said you didn't choose to do business out of business hours." "Well, then, it's amusement, if you like," said Mr. Cragg. "I don't see why you need pretend that a thing is what it isn't, either." Mrs. Cragg tilted her head in a superior fashion. She was vexed that evening, because she had just passed Mrs. Smithers, the chemist's wife, coming out of the chemist's snug house beyond the church. It was a standing grievance with Mrs. Cragg that her husband would obstinately persist in living under the same ample roof with his goods. Other tradesmen of his level in the place had their private houses at a distance, where their wives and children might disport themselves at pleasure, free from touch of shop-keeping. Mrs. Cragg, who loved to describe herself as "a lawyer's daughter," considered that she had taken a downward step in the world by marrying Cragg; and she could not forgive him for refusing her the private house for which she thirsted.