aving allowed himself
to be decoyed afterward to a private concert, and very nearly proposed
to in consequence, during a Symphony in A; an impending terror from
which he could hardly restore himself of his jeopardized safety. "You're
horribly imprudent!"

"Not a bit of it," rejoined Beauty serenely. "That is the superior
wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbor's
wife--she can't marry you!"

"But she may get you into the D. C.," mused the Seraph, who had gloomy
personal recollection of having been twice through that phase of law and
life, and of having been enormously mulcted in damages because he was a
Duke in future, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion,
"You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran away
with me each time!"

"Oh, everybody goes through the D. C. somehow or other," answered Cecil,
with philosophy. "It's like the Church, the Commons, and the Gallows,
you know--one of the popular Institutions."

"And it's the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better figure than
the robbed," laughed the Seraph; consoling himself that he had escaped
the future chance of showing in the latter class of marital defrauded,
by shying that proposal during the Symphony in A, on which his thoughts
ran, as the thoughts of one who has just escaped from an Alpine crevasse
run on the past abyss in which he had been so nearly lost forever. "I
say, Beauty, were you ever near doing anything serious--asking anybody
to marry you, eh? I suppose you have been--they do make such awful hard
running on one" and the poor hunted Seraph stretched his magnificent
limbs with the sigh of a martyred innocent.

"I was once--only once!"

"Ah, by Jove! And what saved you?"

The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying, sympathizing
curiosity toward a fellow-sufferer.

"Well, I'll tell you," said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man who hated
long sentences, and who was about to plunge into a painful past. "It's
ages ago; day I was at a Drawing room; year Blue Ruin won the Clearwell
for Royal, I think. Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw such a
face--the deuce, it almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She was just
out--an angel with a train! She had delicious eyes--like a spaniel's you
know--a cheek like this peach, and lips like that strawberry there, on
the top of your ice. She looked at me, and I was in love! I knew who she
was--Irish lord's daughter--girl I c