arious demand
it invited her to try again. Patient as a cat waiting for its chin to be
stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights
she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out
an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she
remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated
word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore
on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of
chords, and away to its fortunes sailed the play, more than ever a
confirmed triumph in the popular favor.

"You see," whispered Max in the parental ear, "you see now what you have
done."

"It's a perfect scandal!" exclaimed the King, much put out, for he
could not but feel that he was being mocked.

"Not at all," said Max. "All the scandal has been eliminated."

"It ought to be put a stop to!"

"A law doesn't exist."

"This holding authority up to ridicule!"

"When authority has made itself absurd, could you wish it a better fate?
To my mind, you have done a noble work."

"But this," said the King, "this is not what I intended at all."

Max smiled indulgently.

"So much the better," said he. "The unexpected is just as good for you,
sir, as for others."

Then the King drew back again into his corner, to prepare himself for
fresh shocks as the play went on.

The managerial device was simple, effective, and very easy to
understand; and from start to finish it was played with little
variation, though with ever-increasing success. Here and there, where
for a long period no blue-penciled passage occurred, imaginary
censorings had been inserted merely to whip curiosity, with the result
that the atmosphere of innuendo and suggestion was greatly increased.
Indeed, the whole piece reeked of it, new situations had been evolved
which the play had not previously contained; and a stimulated audience
sat metaphorically with its eye to an eye-hole from which the key had
been accommodatingly withdrawn.

And then came the sensation of the evening.

Whether in the course of the performance the King had become so
interested as to forget his caution, or whether between the acts too
much light had penetrated the box at the back of which he had been
sitting, it is now impossible to say. Just before the fall of the
curtain he and the Prince got up and left, and traversing the still
empty corridors unrecognized, returned to