And so, quite unexpectedly, and to the extreme bewilderment of a detective force taken suddenly by surprise, the King found himself in the theater where performance number three of _The Gaudy Girl_ was going on. The house was packed, tumultuous, and excited. As he entered the sheltering gloom of the box his Majesty recognized the words of the play, remembered, too, that a censored passage lay close ahead. It came. A sumptuously bosomed figure stepped into the limelight and sang. In the second verse she threw out a rhyme that seemed to clamor for its pair--threw it out as the angler throws out his fly for the fish that is sure to rise. The King held his breath as the blue-penciled passage drew near. The voice quavered and broke; singer and orchestra stopped dead. The house roared. "Go on!" cried encouraging voices from gallery and pit. "Go on! Go on!" And the singer thus emboldened, and accompanied by one small piping flute, a ridiculous starveling of sound after all the blare that had preceded it, sang with a modest and deprecating air a line which fell very flat indeed--a mere nothing tagged from a nursery rhyme--obviously an importation. Stalls, pit, and gallery rocked and shouted with laughter. "Try again!" roared the crowd; and with small, frightened mimminy-pimminy tones the singer tried again. This time a snippet from the national anthem served her turn--but it was no good, the audience would have none of it; in a crescendo of uproarious 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.