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?” Lloyd asked, wringing my hand.  “I slapped a couple of coats of absolute black on the outside yesterday afternoon to see how it worked.  How’s your head? you bumped it pretty solidly, I imagine.”

“Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations.  “I’ve something better for you to do.”

While he talked he began to strip, and when he stood naked before me he thrust a pot and brush into my hand and said, “Here, give me a coat of this.”

It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over the skin and dried immediately.

“Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had finished; “but now for the real stuff.”

I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see nothing.