ut!" he cried to the soldiers. "Shoot them if they don't
go! Guard the windows!"

Stopford and Dick, at the head of the wedge, pushed past into the
White House. The interior was packed, men were struggling frantically
on the staircase; it seemed hopeless to try to do anything.

Suddenly renewed yells sounded from above, a scream of anguish, howls
of terror. There came a downward surge, then a forward and upward one,
which carried the two men up the stairs and into the President's
private apartments above.

In the large reception-room a mob was struggling at a window, beneath
a blaze of electric light. A soldier was standing there like a statue,
his face fixed with a leer of horror. In his hands was a rifle, with a
blood-stained bayonet, dripping upon the hardwood floor at the edge of
the rug. Upon the rug itself a stream of blood was spouting out of the
air.

Dick looked at the sight and choked. There was something appalling in
the sight: it was the quintessence of horror, that widening pool of
blood, staining the rug, and flowing from an invisible body that
writhed and twisted, while moans of anguish came from unseen lips.

Colonel Stopford leaped back, livid and staring. "God, it's got
eyes--two eyes!" he shouted.

Dick saw them too. The eyes, which alone were visible, were about six
inches from the floor, and they were appearing and disappearing, as
they opened and shut alternately. It was a man lying there, a dying
man, pierced by the soldier's bayonet by pure accident, dying and yet
invisible.

* * * * *

The mob had scattered with shrieks of terror, but a few bolder spirits
remained in a thin circle about that fearful thing on the rug. Dick
bent over the man, and felt the outlines of the writhing body. It was
a man, apparently dressed in some sort of uniform, but this was
covered, from the top of the head to the feet, with a sort of sheer
silken garment, bifurcating below the waist, and resembling a cocoon.
It seemed to appear and alternately to vanish.

Dick seized the filmy stuff in his fingers, rent it, and stripped it
away. Yells of terror and amazement broke from the throats of all.
Instantly the thin circle of spectators had become reinforced by a
struggling mass of men.

The half-visible cocoon clung to Dick's body like spider webs. But the
man who had been wearing it had sprung instantly into view beneath the
cluster of electric lights. He was a fair-haired young