STRANGER. Oh yes, they do! And the first of them's this: To protect myself from total destruction. Farewell!
Curtain.
ACT III
SCENE I
[Room in a hotel prepared for a banquet. There are long tables laden with flowers and candelabra. Dishes with peacocks, pheasants in full plumage, boars' heads, entire lobsters, oysters, salmon, bundles of asparagus, melons and grapes. There is a musicians' gallery with eight players in the right-hand corner at the back.]
[At the high table: the STRANGER in a frock coat; next to him a Civil Uniform with orders; a professorial Frock Coat with an order; and other black Frock Coats with orders of a more or less striking kind. At the second table a few Frock Coats between black Morning Coats. At the third table clean every-day costumes. At the fourth table dirty and ragged figures of strange appearance.]
[The tables are so arranged that the first is furthest to the left and the fourth furthest to the right, so that the people sitting at the fourth table cannot be seen by the STRANGER. At the fourth table CAESAR and the DOCTOR are seated, in shabby clothes. They are the farthest down stage. Dessert has just been handed round and the guests have golden goblets in front of them. The band is playing a passage in the middle of Mendelssohn's Dead March pianissimo. The guests are talking to one another quietly.]
DOCTOR (to CAESAR). The company seems rather depressed and the dessert came too soon!
CAESAR. By the way, the whole thing look's like a swindle! He hasn't made any gold, that's merely a lie, like everything else.
DOCTOR. I don't know, but that's what's being said. But in our enlightened age anything whatever may be expected.