"We have talked it over, haven't we? But we have played with it all the time. It would be so big an experiment." He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought passed from his face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of dismay: "You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our heads." Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling. At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts. "But it _is_ swinging," she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes, oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and touched it. "Yes, it is swinging," he said. He stopped it, and held it quite still. Then he resumed his seat. "Very well, Joan," he said with a new briskness in his voice, "we will make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter! We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making." Joan's face lighted up. "If it fails, then we'll go home," she said. No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of its own accord it stopped. "That's very strange," said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven. "It's unaccountable," he continued. But he was able to account for it the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten minutes to eleven o'clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an earthquake had set the shores of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins. CHAPTER II OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER