The litter of the great mirror lay across the landing, the light from the hall on its shattered fragments, broken glitterings amid a debris of gold. The balustrade broke and swung loose, the stairs drooped, humped again, and gave, sinking amid an onrush of walls, of splintered beams, of ceilings suddenly gaping and discharging their weight in a shoot of plaster, snapped boards and furniture. Something struck him and he fell to his knees, struggled against a smothering mass, then sank, whelmed in the crumbling collapse. Pancha at the stair top, lurching from wall to wall, felt a slow subsidence, a sinking under her feet, and then the frenzied movement settle into a long, rocking swing. A pallor of light showed through the dust rack, and making her way to it she found an open doorway giving on a front room. She passed through; crawled over a heap of entangled furniture toward a window wide to the rising day. She thought she was on the third story, then heard voices, looked out and saw faces almost on a level with her own, the street a few feet below her, a clouded massing of figures, moving, gesticulating, calling up to the windows. The greater bewilderment had shut out all lesser ones. She did not understand, did not ask to, only wanted to get out and be under the safe roof of the sky. Climbing across the sill, she found her feet on grass, stumbled over a broken railing, heard someone shout, and was pulled to her feet by two men. They held her up, looking her over, shaking her a little. Both their faces were as white as if they had been painted. "Are you hurt?" one of them cried, giving her arm a more violent shake as if to jerk the answer out quickly. "Hurt?" she stammered. "No. I'm all right. But--but how did I get out this way--onto the street?" She saw then that his teeth were chattering. Closing his lips tight to hide it he pointed to where she had come from. She turned and looked. The Vallejo, slanting in a drunken sprawl, its roof railing hanging from one corner, its cornices strewn on the pavement, had sunk to one story. Built on the made ground of an old creek bed, it had buckled and gone down, the first and second stories crumpling like a closed accordion, the top floor, disjointed and wrecked, resting on their ruins. CHAPTER XXXIV LOST Aunt Ellen always maintained the first shock threw her out of bed, and then she would amend the statement with a qualifying, "At any rate I was on the floor when Lorry came and I never knew how I got there." She also said that she thought it was the end of the world, and pulled to her feet by Lorry, announced the fact, and heard Lorry's answer, short and sharp, "No--it's an earthquake. Don't talk. Come quick--run!"