At the sight of her treasures Pearl uttered an exclamation of pleasure and fingered them lovingly, laying the emeralds against her cheek with a gesture that was almost a caress.  “Thank you.  Oh, it was good of you to think of them at such a time and rescue them for me.”  Her soft, sliding voice was warm with gratitude.  “They are all here.”  She slipped the rings on her fingers, her eyes dreaming on them.  She fastened the emeralds about her neck and hid them beneath her gown, pressing them against her flesh as if she found pleasure in their cold contact.

She lifted her eyes to him; her smile was languourously ardent; impulsively she caught his hand and held it for a moment against her cheek.  He started and she felt him tremble.  Then hastily he withdrew his hand, murmuring at the same time a confused, almost inarticulate protest; but Pearl did not wait to hear it.  She had risen abruptly and, catching up her cloak and wrapping it hastily about her, had opened the door before he could reach it and had stepped out into the snow.

Seagreave, who had paused a moment to close the door behind them, heard her utter a sharp exclamation and turned quickly.

“Dios!” she cried.  “Dios!  What is it?”

She had fallen back against the wall of the cabin and was gazing about her with a strange and startled expression.  Seagreave’s eye reflected it as he too stared about him with a look not yet of alarm but of wild, deep wonder.  For the moment, at least, all things were the same.  Above them the peaks towered whitely in the sullen, gray sky.  On a level with their eyes, the illimitable forests of bare, black trees mingling with the denser and more compact shapes of the evergreens, stretched away over the hillsides, casting their long blue shadows on the snow-covered ground until they wore blurred indistinguishably in the violet haze of distance.  Unchanged, and yet so strong was the presage of some unimagined and disastrous event, that when a long shiver ran through the earth Pearl screamed aloud, and, stumbling toward Seagreave, reached out gropingly for his hand.

For the second that they waited the earth, too, seemed to wait, a solemn, awe-filled moment of incalculable change, a tense moment, as if the unknown, mysterious forces of nature were gathering themselves together for some mighty, unprecedented effort.

Then shiver after shiver shook the ground, the earth trembled as if in some deep convulsion, the white peaks seemed bowing and bending—­then a roar as of many waters, the air darkened and earth and sky seemed filled with the mass of the mountains slipping down—­down to chaos.

Pearl had ceased to scream and had fallen to her knees, clinging desperately to Seagreave.  Her face was blanched white with terror, and she was muttering incoherent prayers.

As for Harry, he had forgotten her, forgotten himself, and was living through moments or centuries, he knew not, which, of wonder and horror.