Act I

The scene is a darkened room, which the curtain reveals so stealthily
that if there was a mouse on the stage it is there still. Our object
is to catch our two chief characters unawares; they are Darkness and
Light.

The room is so obscure as to be invisible, but at the back of the
obscurity are French windows, through which is seen Lob's garden
bathed in moon-shine. The Darkness and Light, which this room and
garden represent, are very still, but we should feel that it is only
the pause in which old enemies regard each other before they come to
the grip. The moonshine stealing about among the flowers, to give
them their last instructions, has left a smile upon them, but it is a
smile with a menace in it for the dwellers in darkness. What we
expect to see next is the moonshine slowly pushing the windows open,
so that it may whisper to a confederate in the house, whose name is
Lob. But though we may be sure that this was about to happen it does
not happen; a stir among the dwellers in darkness prevents it.

These unsuspecting ones are in the dining-room, and as a communicating
door opens we hear them at play. Several tenebrious shades appear in
the lighted doorway and hesitate on the two steps that lead down into
the unlit room. The fanciful among us may conceive a rustle at the
same moment among the flowers. The engagement has begun, though not
in the way we had intended.

VOICES.--
'Go on, Coady: lead the way.'
'Oh dear, I don't see why I should go first.'
'The nicest always goes first.'
'It is a strange house if I am the nicest.'
'It is a strange house.'
'Don't close the door; I can't see where the switch is.'
'Over here.'

They have been groping their way forward, blissfully unaware of how
they shall be groping there again more terribly before the night is
out. Some one finds a switch, and the room is illumined, with the
effect that the garden seems to have drawn back a step as if worsted
in the first encounter. But it is only waiting.

The apparently inoffensive chamber thus suddenly revealed is, for a
bachelor's home, creditably like a charming country house
drawing-room and abounds in the little feminine touches that are so
often best applied by the hand of man. There is nothing in the room
inimical to the ladies, unless it be the cut flowers which are from
the garden and possibly in collusion with it. The fireplace may also
be a little dubious. It has been hacked out of a thick wall which may
have been there when the other walls were not, and is presumably the
cavern where Lob, when alone, sits chatting to himself among the blue
smoke. He is as much at home by this fire as any gnome that may be
hiding among its shadows; but he is less familiar with the