"But how the deuce did you get her ?" "Yes, how ?" asked Miss Winwood, with a smile in her straight blue eyes.
"How does one get anything one wants in this world," said Paul, "except by going at it, hammer and tongs ?" A little later, when Paul opened the dining-room for her to pass out, she touched his shoulder affectionately and laughed.

"Hammer and tongs to Sophie Zobraska! Oh, Paul, aren't you a bit of a humbug ?" Perhaps he was.

But he was ingenuous in his desire to shield his Princess's action from vain conjecture.

It were better that he should be supposed, in vulgar phrase, to have roped her in, as he had roped in a hundred other celebrities in his time.

For there the matter ended.