Dr. Grantham's hand still moved on the rheostat handle and as the thin whine from the cabinet came louder they saw that the disk was but a mere ghost-like shape against the sunlight, and then that too had vanished. The paper-weight was invisible! They gazed silently, fascinated, and then as Grantham moved back the control in his hand the shadowy circle of the disk appeared again, it grew quickly more opaque, and as the switch clicked and the cabinet's whine ceased it rested there as black and opaque and visible as ever! Dr. Grantham leaned and grasped it, handed it to the four. Wonderingly they passed it from hand to hand, seeing it the same as before, quite black and commonplace and visible. Carton, himself oddly stirred by what he had seen, heard Burns' exclamation from beside him. "Good Lord! What a story!" "And you can do that to anything?" Carton demanded of the physicist. The Invisible Man Dr. Grantham nodded. "To any matter. Gray and I are now finishing a cabinet-projector that will be of sufficient power to make invisible itself and all for a few feet around it. With it a man would be perfectly invisible." "An invisible man?" President Ellsworth was looking at the scientist keenly. "My dear Grantham--do you mean it would make a man as invisible as that paper-weight?" The physicist calmly nodded. "Just that, and if he had the cabinet and its compact batteries attached to him he could move at will invisibly." "But the possibilities of that are rather appalling," said President Ellsworth, his brows knit. "Do you realize that if some criminal were to get hold of the thing, he could----" "No criminal is going to hear of that part of it, even," Grantham told him reassuringly. "I know that you, gentlemen, will at my request confine your accounts to the principle of the discovery and to my demonstration without hinting of its possibilities on a larger scale." Already the reporters were at the door, but Carton turned back. "You wouldn't mind if I'd take that paper-weight with me?" he asked, somewhat apologetically. "Of course I know it's all square but editors are such a skeptical crew--" "Of course not," the physicist said, handing it to him. "Any valid scientific discovery will stand all the investigations of it that can be conceived. I only trust that you'll restrain your imaginations as much as possible in your descriptions." A half-hour later Carton was pouring out an excited tale to the city editor of the _Inquirer_, who heard him with calm, lighting a cigar. When he had tossed away the match, he looked up. "It all boils down, then," he commented, "to the fact that Dr. Grantham has made a claim and then put on some hocus-pocus up there to convince you of it." "Hocus-pocus nothing!" exclaimed Carton heatedly. "I tell you I was as skeptical as you about it until he did the thing before our eyes, made this paper-weight disappear!"