ained.
"Yet they were powerful, and it appears that when death comes they force
practically instantaneous disintegration. Remarkable! Most remarkable!
Well, the only thing is not to die. They do not harm so long as one
lives. But I do wonder who smashed in that dog's head."

Light, however, was thrown upon this when a frightened housemaid brought
the news that Gaffer Bedshaw had that very morning, not more than an
hour back, gone violently insane, and was strapped down at home, in
the huntsman's lodge, where he raved of a battle with a ferocious and
gigantic beast that he had encountered in the Tichlorne pasture. He
claimed that the thing, whatever it was, was invisible, that with his
own eyes he had seen that it was invisible; wherefore his tearful wife
and daughters shook their heads, and wherefore he but waxed the more
violent, and the gardener and the coachman tightened the straps by
another hole.

Nor, while Paul Tichlorne was thus successfully mastering the problem of
invisibility, was Lloyd Inwood a whit behind. I went over in answer to a
message of his to come and see how he was getting on. Now his laboratory
occupied an isolated situation in the midst of his vast grounds. It was
built in a pleasant little glade, surrounded on all sides by a dense
forest growth, and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic
path. But I have travelled that path so often as to know every foot of
it, and conceive my surprise when I came upon the glade and found no
laboratory. The quaint shed structure with its red sandstone chimney
was not. Nor did it look as if it ever had been. There were no signs of
ruin, no debris, nothing.

I started to walk across what had once been its site. "This," I said to
myself, "should be where the step went up to the door." Barely were the
words out of my mouth when I stubbed my toe on some obstacle, pitched
forward, and butted my head into something that FELT very much like a
door. I reached out my hand. It WAS a door. I found the knob and turned
it. And at once, as the door swung inward on its hinges, the whole
interior of the laboratory impinged upon my vision. Greeting Lloyd, I
closed the door and backed up the path a few paces. I could see nothing
of the building. Returning and opening the door, at once all the
furniture and every detail of the interior were visible. It was indeed
startling, the sudden transition from void to light and form and color.

"What do you think of it, eh?" Ll