The block of ice you can not smash with your biggest hammer is broken into smithereens by a needle.

That's the peril before Stafford--but let us hope he will prove the exception to the rule and escape.

He's safe at present, at any rate." She though of the scene she had witnessed, the girl sitting sideways on Stafford Orme's horse, and her face flushed for an instant.
"Are you sure ?" she said.
"Quite!" he responded, confidently.

"I know all Stafford's flirtations, great and small: if there was anything serious he would tell me; and as he hasn't--there isn't." She laughed; the slow, soft laugh which made Howard think suddenly, strangely, of a sleepy tigress he had once watched in a rajah's zoo, as she lay basking in the sun: a thing of softness and beauty and--death.
"We've had a most amusing conversation, Mr.Howard," she said.

"I don't know when I've been so interested--or so tempted." "Tempted ?" He looked at her with a slow, expectant smile.
"Oh, yes," she murmured, turning her eyes upon him with a half-mocking light in them.