As she sat listening to the meaningless reading and the sighing of the wind above the Chapel roof, Barbara's eyes on the stained-glass figure in the rose-window were full of a wistful loneliness. If her father were only alive--if he could be near her now! Unconsciously her gaze strayed across the hedges, to the gray roof of the old temple where lived the eccentric solitary to whom her thought insistently recurred. In her trouble she longed to go to him, with a longing the greater because it seemed fantastic and illogical. She recalled suddenly the quaint six-year-old of the huge clogs and patched _kimono_--Ishikichi, troubled over the giving up of the family establishment, puzzling his baby brain over the hard things of life. She was startled by a sound outside--the single, shrill, high scream of a horse in some stable near at hand. It cut through a pause in the service, sharp, curdling, like a cry of mortal fear. A baby, near Barbara, awoke and began to cry and the mother soothed it with whispered murmurings. Suddenly there arose a strange rattling, a groaning of timbers. The bishop ceased reading. People were rising to their feet. The building was shifting, swaying, with a sickening upward vibration, as though it were being trotted on some Brobdingnagian knee. Barbara felt a qualm like the first touch of _mal de mer_. "_Ji-shin! Ji-shin!_" rose the cry, and there was a rush for the open air. In another moment she found herself out of doors with the frightened crowd. It was her first experience of earthquake, and the terror had gripped her bodily. The wet trees were waving to and fro like gigantic fans, and a dull moan like an echo in a subterranean cavern seemed to issue from the very ground. A section of tiling slid from the Chapel roof with a crash. "Rather severe that, for Tokyo," said the bishop at her elbow, where he stood calmly, watch in hand. "Almost two minutes and vertical movement." "Two minutes!" she gasped. She had thought it twenty. The nauseating swing had ceased, but in an instant, with a vicious wrench, it began again. "The secondary oscillations," he said. "It will all be over in a ..." As he spoke, the air swelled with a horrible, crunching, grinding roar, like the complaint of a million riven timbers. Across the lane a sinister dust-cloud sprang into the air like a monstrous hand with spread fingers. "It is one of the temples!" said the bishop, and hurried with the rest, Barbara following him.