“I wonder how soon it will be safe for us to leave!” said Mr. Gloucester. CHAPTER XXI--Interrupting a Concert That evening the nightly concert of the “Carpentaria Band” was held in the great court of the Exposition Palace, partly because the weather was threatening, and partly because the Y.M.C.A. wished it so. The stalwart members of the Y.M.C.A. were prominent and joyous, and they pervaded the City to the number of some fifty thousand. They were nearly all young, and they were all, without exception, enthusiastic. They had taken possession of practically the whole of the tables on the three tiers of balconies that surrounded the court, and there was also a considerable sprinkling of them on the ground floor. They liked Carpentaria; they liked his music; they liked his way of conducting. They admired him when he split the drums of their ears, and they equally admired him when he wooed those organs with a hint of sound that was something less than a whisper. They violently cheered his marches, and with the same violence they cheered his serenades and his cradlesongs. Consequently Carpentaria was content. He was more than content--he glowed with pleasure. He was the centre of the vast illuminated court, with its ornate architecture, and its wonderful roof, and its serried rows of lights. All eyes were centred on him. He swayed not only his band, but the multitude, by a single movement of the slim baton--that magic bit of ivory which he held in his hand. He said to himself that he had never had a better, a more appreciative and enthusiastic audience in the whole of his glorious career. The result was, that-he conducted in his most variegated and polychromatic manner. He did things with his wand that no conductor had ever done with a wand before; he performed gyrations, contortions, and acrobatics beyond all his previous exploits. In a word, he surpassed himself. He was in the very act of surpassing himself, in his renowned “Cockney Serenade,” when he observed, out of the tail of his eye, a middle-aged man, who was forcing his way at all costs across the floor of the hall towards the bandstand. When seven thousand people are packed on chairs on a single floor, it is not the quietest task in the world to penetrate through them. And the middle-aged man was not doing it quietly, in fact, he was making decidedly more noise than the “Cockney Serenade,” and attracting quite as much attention. A number of ardently musical young men on the grand balcony leaned over the wrought-iron parapet and advised the middle-aged man to lie down and die, in a manner unmistakably ferocious. (It is extraordinary how ferocious a youth can be on mere lemonade.) But the middle-aged man continued his course, and he arrived at the bandstand, despite official and unofficial protests, simultaneously with the conclusion of the serenade.