I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he nodded and went on down the corridor.  I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper.  What was he going to do before lunch-time?  Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two.  I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely save that engagement.  I got up and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.

As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud.  A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor.  The Time Traveller was not there.  I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—­a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes.  The Time Machine had gone.  Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty.  A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.

I felt an unreasonable amazement.  I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be.  As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-servant appeared.

We looked at each other.  Then ideas began to come.  ’Has Mr. ——­ gone out that way?’ said I.

’No, sir.  No one has come out this way.  I was expecting to find him here.’

At that I understood.  At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him.  But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.  The Time Traveller vanished three years ago.  And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.

EPILOGUE

One cannot choose but wonder.  Will he ever return?  It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times.  He may even now—­if I may use the phrase—­be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.  Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved?  Into the manhood of the race:  for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time!  I say, for my own part.  He, I know—­for the question had been discussed