The cottage itself had completely vanished. All that remained of it was a mound thickly overgrown with weeds and coarse grass, from which protruded here and there fragments of charred beams and rafters. The encroaching heath had hidden any signs of any garden there might once have been, and it was impossible for the Professor to form any idea of what the place had looked like while it was still standing. But the laboratory, having been built of concrete, had defied the utter obliteration to which the rest of the premises had succumbed. Its broken walls, rough and jagged, stood up in a gaunt rectangle, roofless, their foundations hidden deep in the all-effacing vegetation, but still marking without fear of error the site upon which the building had stood.