There was a deadly quiet in the house when presently two little kimonoed forms stole through the halls and crept to the library door.  Billie felt for the knob in the darkness and turned it.  The door was locked.  In the dense atmosphere it was difficult for them to realize what this meant at first.

“Mary, it’s—­it’s the-what-do-you-call-’em,” said Billie incoherently.

Mary nodded silently.  She might have shrieked her answer aloud, for the storm had arrived with a great howling of wind and rain, and with flashes of lightning followed by repeated and deafening cannonades of thunder.

The rain rattled on the roof like iron and all the demons in bedlam seemed to be besieging the house.  Then a most sickening thing happened.  The floor appeared to be heaving under their feet.  Doors all over the house banged to with loud reports like revolvers shooting off.  There was a crash in the library, a loud cry from within, the door flew open and a figure rushed past.  Mary, kneeling on the floor at the threshold, involuntarily reached out her hands and seized the flying skirts of the apparition, or whatever it was, which disappeared like a shadow through the passage door, leaving Mary still holding the substance of the shadow which seemed to be the skirt she had grasped.

A second shock followed almost immediately, less violent than the first but quite as sickening.  For one instant the house tossed and pitched like a ship on a choppy sea.  Then it settled down on its foundations.  Most Japanese houses are built on wooden supports, stout square pillars rounded off at the base and resting in a round socket of stone.  This gives a certain elasticity for resisting shocks which a firmly built house would not endure.

The girls lay side by side on the floor of the passage, too frightened to speak.  There is a horror about an earthquake that is indescribable to those who have never felt it; a feeling of sickening inefficiency and helplessness.

After a while they plucked up courage to rise and totter weakly into the library, where Billie, her hand shaking with nervous excitement, struck a match and lit a candle.  The room was in dire confusion.  Chairs were upset, books had fallen off the shelves and lay scattered about the floor, and the iron safe had crashed over on its face.  On the desk and the floor about it were numbers of loose sheets of paper and a narrow roll of tracing paper, which had uncoiled itself and lay half on the desk, half on the floor like a long white serpent.

Mechanically they began to put things to rights.  Mary gathered up the books and set them back on the shelves and Billie stood the chairs on their legs and collected the papers.  They were not important ones, she knew, only decoys, as her father had called them.  In the mean time the house rocked in the clutches of the storm.

“I don’t know why we bother to do this,” said Billie laughing hysterically.  “We may be flying through the air any minute ourselves along with the chairs and papers and everything else.”