A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

THE crash seemed afterward to Laroche like the fall of a castle of cards, like the wreck wrought by the wind in the gossamer symmetries of a cobweb, like a sudden awakening to the conditions of reality from the allurements of a dream, so potent seemed the force, so tenuous the fine-spun scheme when all its fibres were rent apart.

So unprescient had he been!