Heavy feet on the stairway woke me from my trance. Unregarded of them both I grasped my pistol from the floor and sprang for the window. A door opened somewhere above, and a voice asked:
From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with outstretched hands--hands that reached upward from the pit of torment, my fancy told me--and pleaded for a little love. "In all this world is there no little ray of love for me?"--it was so my imagination rather than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the servant spoke again from the stairway.
She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still fixed upon those of Charles she cried:
"Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is--dead. Your master's murdered! And there, there," and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile lover, "there is the man who murdered him!"
And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with blood-stained feet.
Period, the present. Place, any American city.
The Scene _represents two drawing rooms, exact duplicates, furnished alike to the smallest detail. Either room might be the reflection of the other in a mirror. Each occupies half of the stage. The division line between them is indicated, towards the hack of the stage, by two pianos, which sit hack to back at the center of the hack drop. This division is carried by the pianos a quarter or a third of the way towards the footlights. The division is further suggested, towards the front of the stage, hy a couple of settees or couches, which also sit back to back._
John Speaker and Mary Speaker _remain all the time in the room at the right of the stage. They are not aware of_ John Thinker _and_ Mary Thinker, _who are, throughout the play, in the room at the left. The_ Thinkers, _however, are aware of the_ Speakers.
_In make-up, looks, dress, etc., the two_Johns _are precisely alike. The same is true of_ Mary Speaker and Mary Thinker. _The_ Johns _are conventional-looking, prosperous Americans of from 38 to 40 years of age. The two_ Marys _are a few years younger._
