You saw the plot at once as he constructed it; the pipe ash became explicable in the seduction of Miss Belton's charms.

The cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately, to tangle round the lady.

There was in it that superiority in the art of legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing manipulation, so applauded in regions where romance has not yet been quite trampled down by reason.
Lorne scored; he scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it was the very climax and coruscation of score.

He scored not only by the cards he held but by the beautiful way he played them, if one may say so.

His nature came into this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy, his young angry irony.