“Well, yes. Pretty fair. There, that will do. Oh! I am so happy. Edward Beaumont, M.P. You’ll be Sir Edward in no time and a Peer before your first twinge of the gout.” “They don’t make Peers of men whose greatest worldly wealth is a beautiful wife. At least, they don’t now-a-days.” “Of course, I’m joking, Edward. Isn’t papa thoughtful? I don’t suppose you’d have thought of it yourself.” “I don’t suppose I should,” conceded Edward. “I thought only of you.” CHAPTER VI. _Dulce est desipere in loco_—a Latin tag that assures us we may on occasions pleasantly unbend. Edward Beaumont, as we have seen, was dreaming love’s young dream, than which we are all convinced there is nothing sweeter in this brief life of ours, and seeing visions of a glorious future rounded by the woolsack, and I know not what other suggestions of a lively imagination. Sam Storth, the partner whom he was fool enough to at the same time trust implicitly and regard with a sort of good-humoured contempt, was essaying the gentle art, _desipere in loco_, after a fashion of his own, in a word, combining business with pleasure. The Long Vacation, beloved of lawyers of ample means, bemoaned by those members of the junior bar to whom briefs—briefs lightly “marked” at that—are as angels’ visits, few and far between, was now dragging its weary course—and Mr. Storth had time enough and to spare on his hands. He would have liked to don that much-prized shooting-jacket and those knickerbockers that so fittingly displayed a calf whose proportions Sam surveyed with a proper pride, and to which he rightly conceived the costume of the courts failed to do adequate justice. But here was he doomed to the treadmill, whilst his partner dangled at the petticoats of an Archdeacon’s daughter, and had the confounded impudence to stretch his legs under an earl’s mahogany.