She nodded; and Peter's fingers slipped away from hers as they passed on.
They reached Mr. Lamantia's room, and Simon lifted his hand and knocked.
Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr. Lamantia's emotions at greater length; but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr. Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it. With eighty-five thousand pounds in banknotes of small denominations in his bag, an express service to the tall timber mapped out in front of him, and his aesthetic soul ripe with the remembered beauty and tacit acquiescence of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he opened his door with the vision of her face rising before his eyes, and saw the vision smashed into a whirling kaleidoscope of fragments that came together again at the lean smiling figure of the man who had once come striding through the wet night to drag him out of his car and immerse him in the Thames. His eyes bulged and his jaw dropped; and then the lean" figure's hand pushed him kindly but firmly backwards and followed him on into the room, and Peter Quentin closed the door behind them and put his back to it.
"Well, Julian," said the Saint breezily, "how are all the little stocks and shares today?"
A tinge of colour squeezed slowly back into Mr. Lamantia's ashen face. When he had first seen the figures of men outside his door he had had one dreadful instant of the fear that perhaps after all he had left his retirement too late.
"How did you get up here?" he stammered.
"We flew," said the Saint affably.
Suddenly his left fist shot over with the whole weight of his shoulder behind it. The upper knuckles came on the line of Mr. Lamantia's twitching mouth, the lower knuckles on the point of his jaw-bone, clean and crisp in the horizontal centre of his face; and Mr. Lamantia had a hazy feeling that his brain had been knocked off its moorings and was revolving slowly and painfully inside his skull. When it had settled down again to a rhythmic but stationary singing, he became aware that the automatic which he had been trying to pull from his hip pocket was gone.
"Tie him up, Peter," said the Saint calmly.
Peter Quentin came off the door and produced a coil of stout cord from under his coat. Mr. Lamantia went down fighting, but Peter's muscular handling rapidly reduced him to mere verbal protest, which was largely biological in tone.