"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake. The house is falling." She replied in a strange, quiet voice: "I know." She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps, longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness, passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer relief. But it was answered in a moment. "I called to you twice," he said; and his wife answered: "I heard;" and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice. It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one who was stunned. Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light, inscrutably veiling her thoughts. "Quick!" he cried. "Get up. There's no time to lose." He lifted the child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes. "Come." His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her. "Good God!" he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips and was uttered. "Do you want to kill us all?" "I had to find a cloak." "A cloak!" he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife made no rejoinder. "To be buried under this house for the sake of a cloak," he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could hardly pronounce the words.