young Englishwoman, paying a farewell call upon the criminals of The
House of Peril, has been drugged by them. She wakes up prematurely to
find them collecting her pearl necklace--four thousand pounds' worth
of it. Murder is in the air, when suddenly, to the surprise of
the villains (but not to ours, for we had had fair warning of the
_denouement_), enter to the rescue two admirers of the lady. In the
excitement attendant upon her recovery from a swoon the druggists
are suffered to pass out through the door into the arms of a posse of
constabulary.

At this juncture, the lady having been restored to her senses, you
might suppose that the rescue-party would take at least some fleeting
interest in the disposal of their prisoners. There you would be in
error. The final curtain is due and there are peremptory affairs of
the heart to be wound up before we can get away. So, to clear the
ground, one of the admirers makes a gallant statement which redeems
the other's character from a false suspicion, and, rightly regarding
himself as _de trop_, goes off by another exit and shows no further
concern in either of the two developments--on or off the stage.

The remaining admirer, left alone in the company of the lady, ignores
with a fine detachment the impotent rage that his captives are
presumably venting in the passage just outside, and declares the
ardour of his passion as a man might do in the breathless calm of
a moonlit solitude _a deux_. And on this idyllic scene the curtain
descends.

[Illustration: "PAP-PA" AND "POOSY-CAT."

_Wachner_ . . . . . MR. NORMAN MCKINNEL.
_Madame Wachner_ . . MISS ANNIE SCHLETTER.]

The most satisfying thing in the play was the acting of Miss ANNIE
SCHLETTER as "_Madame" Wachner_ of the Chalet des Muguets, an
extraordinarily clever study of the doting _Hausfrau,_ much busied
about the service of her lord. Mr. NORMAN MCKINNEL as _Wachner_ easily
contrived to convey the typically Teuton blend of brutishness, and
domestic sentimentality, combined with the heavy playfulness which by
a curious delusion, ineradicably racial, is mistaken over there for
humour. "Ja, ja," he says complacently, "I have the humour-sense."

It was regrettable that the cosmopolitan _Anna Wolsky,_ acted with
great animation by Miss MARGARET HALSTAN, had to withdraw from the
scene at an early stage in consequence of being murdered--I don't
know how, as we neither saw nor heard the details. Her friend, _Sylvia
Bailey_,