“How you do go on with those women, Beauty,” growled the Seraph, one day after a morning of fearful hard work consequent on having played the Foot Guards at Lord's, and, in an unwary moment, having 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.