The path of temptation is sweet to tread, and the air about it is fragrant with the lovely scents of forbidden flowers. Never once did Lady Vest and Mr. Dunn waver from the exercise of those formalities that are bred in the bone of the county families of England and come as naturally to the meanest cadet of the landed gentry as writing good plays to a dramatic critic: she was ever Lady Vest to him, he Mr. Dunn to her; but insensibly they fell into the habit of dancing a while every afternoon (except, of course, on Sundays), and had come to no harm whatsoever, but had rather gained in the way of exercise, had it not been for the fact that the monstrous suspicions of my lord were never at rest. For, to their indignant amazement, Lord Vest had informed them just before dinner on the night we tell of that he had for some time past been having his lady watched by detectives; that he was fully informed of their goings-on; and was now awaiting dinner with some impatience, for after dinner he was prepared, he said, to be very interested to hear what steps they, his lady and Mr. Dunn, were going to take about it. And it was at that moment before dinner that Mr. Dunn had first decided that he, for his part, would prefer to take steps of a purely material nature, and those in a direction opposite from any that Lord Vest might be treading at that moment. Nor was he in any way weakened in his decision when Lord Vest, whilst pressing on Mr. Dunn a second cocktail--so that, said my lord, Mr. Dunn should have no excuse for not enjoying a dinner that promised to be very entertaining in the way of table-talk, in which Mr. Dunn as a rule excelled--related how he had that afternoon suborned the saxophone player in the orchestra of the dance-club into allowing him, his lordship, to take the man’s place; and therefore had had, whilst emitting to the best of his ability those screams and noises that are expected of a saxophone player, an unrivalled opportunity of judging whether his lady and Mr. Dunn were proficient in those offensive irregularities of the legs, hips, and teeth which, said my lord crudely, were dignified with the name of dancing. Mr. Dunn had then sworn at his luck, which never had been but rotten; for on this afternoon of all he had taken the liberty to introduce Lady Vest to certain movements recently imported from the Americas; and he had no doubt but that the instruction of those quite delightful and original movements might have appeared, to one playing the saxophone in a hostile frame of mind, compromising to a degree. Such thoughts as these, before and during dinner, had confirmed Mr. Dunn in his decision to take the steps already referred to at the earliest possible moment. Nor can we really blame the poor young gentleman: the occasion was decidedly domestic: Mr. Dunn was in a cruelly false position: and the degraded mentality of his lordship was never less amenable to polite argument than on that fateful night.