starting toward the place by the window where they should have been,
and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and
impalpable dust which thickly coated everything.

"My typewriter? Is--can _that_ be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's
the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"

There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft
and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some
bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two--even a few rubber key-caps,
still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.

All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss
and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this
strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the
rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white
powder.

Back with a shuddering cry the girl sprang, terrified.

"Merciful Heavens!" she supplicated. "What--what does all this mean?"

For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion,
numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing
amazement, as perhaps you might do if you should see a dead man move.

Then to the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and
that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs all
cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.