“Anything wrong, sir?” a policeman inquired, opening the cell door and looking in.  “Why, what have you done with the prisoner—­where is he?”

“I have no more idea than you,” the lawyer gasped.  “He was talking to me quite naturally, when he suddenly left off—­said something idiotic—­and disappeared.”

Hamar did not dally.  He quietly slipped through the open door, and darting swiftly along a stone passage, found his way to the entrance, which was blocked by two constables with their backs to him.

“I’ll give the brutes something to remember me by,” Hamar chuckled, and, taking a run, he kicked first one, and then the other with all his might, precipitating them both into the street.  He then sped past them—­home.

Hamar, by astute inquiries, learned that the police had decided to hush up the affair, not being quite sure how they had figured, or, indeed, what had actually occurred.  As to Cotton, the shock he had undergone, at seeing Hamar suddenly melt away before his eyes, was so great that he went off his head, and had to be confined in an asylum.

After this adventure Hamar shunned restaurants, and manipulating his new property sparingly, and with the utmost caution, warned Kelson and Curtis to do the same.

“I’ll bet anything,” he said to them, “it was a put-up job on the part of the Unknown—­a cunning device to make us break the compact.”

“Oh, we’ll be careful enough as far as that goes,” Curtis growled.  “It’s this vegetarian diet that I can’t stick.  Fancy living on beans and potatoes, and only milk and aerated water to wash them down.  It was bad enough in San Francisco, when we hadn’t the means even to smell meat cooking—­but with the money literally burning a hole in one’s pocket, it’s ten times worse!  Whatever the Unknown has in store for us it can’t be a worse Hell than what I’ve got now.  What say you, Matt?”

“The same!  Precisely the same!” Kelson said.  “Only it’s love—­not potatoes and beans that worries me.  In the old days when I was penniless, I did get some consolation from knowing it was all hopeless—­but now—­now, when, as Ed says, ’the money’s literally burning a hole in one’s pocket,’ and everything might go swimmingly—­not to be allowed even to buy a bracelet—­is more than human nature can endure.  I certainly can’t conceive a Hell to beat it.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Hamar said, “and for goodness’ sake don’t let the Unknown give you an opportunity of comparing.”

The night succeeding this conversation, Hamar, Curtis and Kelson introduced their new properties into the programme of their entertainment in Cockspur Street, and London got another big thrill.  Hamar exhibited such startling proofs of his power of invisibility, that not only was the whole audience convinced, but from amongst certain prominent members of the Council of the Psychical Research Society, who were attending with the express purpose of unmasking Hamar, two had epileptic fits on the spot, and several, before they could get home, became raving lunatics.