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“Yours, mate,” the young giant assured Harley, with a generous wave of his hands. “Play ‘Home, Sweet Home’ on it, and we’ll all come and have a good cry.”

He went back to his work of salvage.

Harley, after regarding the piano and the children who gathered upon it in delight, sighed wearily, turned and followed him across the street.

The incident had revived his courage a little and banished his nausea, and he forced himself to contemplate the possibility that Grace and Joan had been somewhere in the streets at the time of the shake. There had been hundreds of people in the streets at that moment, and comparatively few had been killed and injured. Perhaps Grace had been injured and was now being cared for in the hospital camp. He would not believe that anything worse had happened to her. It was not possible after the divine resurgence of hope of the morning.

He looked up as he approached the mass of smoking ruins which was all that remained of the imposing Masonic Hotel. All the morning he had avoided looking in this direction lest he should be compelled to admit the possibility that his loved ones had died here. Now it obtruded itself, and he found himself looking at the ruins in spite of himself.

A crowd of curious people stood in the roadway at a respectful distance from the walls which threatened to fall at any moment. Under these death-traps were braver folk, straining and sweating to make ingress to the fire-blackened tomb of many victims. Some worked recklessly with black smoke curling around them, their mouths and nostrils shielded with damp rags, prising out smouldering beams with any lever which came to hand. Some had found a way beneath the mass where a doorway had resisted the terrible strain.

It was through this doorway that two men carried a small body just as James Harley elbowed his way unwillingly through the awed crowd. Ten-