For the rest of Colonel Starbottle's life he never ceased to deplore this last act of caution, and regret that he had not put the cheque in his pocket. For as he walked to the window the floor suddenly appeared to rise beneath his feet and as suddenly sank again, and he was thrown violently against the mantelpiece. He felt sick and giddy. With a terrible apprehension of apoplexy in his whirling brain, he turned toward his companion, who had risen from his seat and was supporting himself by his swinging desk with a panic-stricken face and a pallor equal to his own. In another moment a bookcase toppled with a crash to the floor, a loud outcry arose from the outer offices, and amidst the sounds of rushing feet, the breaking of glass, and the creaking of timber, the two men dashed with a common instinct to the door. It opened two inches and remained fixed. With the howl of a caged wild beast Dumphy threw himself against the rattling glass of the window that opened on the level of the street. In another instant Colonel Starbottle was beside him on the side-walk, and the next they were separated, unconsciously, uncaringly, as if they had been the merest strangers in contact in a crowd. The business that had brought them together, the unfinished, incomplete, absorbing interests of a moment ago were forgotten--were buried in the oblivion of another existence, which had no sympathy with this, whose only instinct was to fly--where, they knew not! The middle of the broad street was filled with a crowd of breathless, pallid, death-stricken men who had lost all sense but the common instinct of animals. There were hysterical men, who laughed loudly without a cause, and talked incessantly of what they knew not. There were dumb, paralysed men, who stood helplessly and hopelessly beneath cornices and chimneys that toppled over and crushed them. There were automatic men, who flying, carried with them the work on which they were engaged--one whose hands were full of bills and papers, another who held his ledger under his arm. There were men who had forgotten the ordinary instincts of decency--some half-dressed. There were men who rushed from the fear of death into its presence; two were picked up, one who had jumped through a skylight, another who had blindly leaped from a fourth-story window. There were brave men who trembled like children; there was one whose life had been spent in scenes of daring and danger, who cowered paralysed in the corner of the room from which a few inches of plastering had fallen. There were hopeful men who believed that the danger was over, and having passed, would, by some mysterious law, never recur; there were others who shook their heads and said that the next shock would be fatal. There were crowds around the dust that arose from fallen chimneys and cornices, around runaway horses that had dashed as madly as their drivers against lamp-posts, around telegraph and newspaper offices eager to know the extent of the disaster.