Jopley looked round, with the candle burning, as the sudden whirl of movement caught his car. An almost comically incredulous expression transfixed his face as he grasped the import of the scene; but the shock only stopped him for a moment. In the next instant he was grabbing for his own gun and plunging towards the Saint at the same time.
Only for an instant. And then he was brought up again, rocking, as if he had run into an invisible wall, before the round black muzzle of the automatic in the Saint's hand.
The Saint's smile was seraphically gentle.
"If I have to shoot you, Algernon," he said, "I shall be terribly disappointed."
The man stared at him in silence while Lasser's unconscious body, released from the Saint's grasp, slid down and rolled over on the floor.
"You can put your hand in your other pocket," Simon went on in that soft and terrible voice. "I want the rest of that sticking plaster. And then we will talk a little more about this Guy Fawkes party."
XII
Standing in the shadows outside the library windows, the Saint studied the scene within. The chairs where Peter and Hoppy and Brenda Marlow sat were ranged roughly at the three corners of a square; approximately at the fourth corner stood Borieff, leaning against the back of an armchair and watching them, with his gun in his hand and a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. Simon could easily have dropped him where he stood, but that was not what he wanted. He saw that Borieff's back was directly turned to the door through which they had first entered the library and spent a few seconds more printing estimated distances and angles on his memory. Then he returned silently along the path to the room he had just left.
Jopley, taped hand and foot exactly as the Saint had been a little while ago, glared up at him malevolently from the floor; and in another corner Lasser groaned and stirred uneasily as if he was rousing front a troubled sleep; but that was very near the limit of their power of self-expression. The Saint smiled encouragingly at Jopley as he went by.
"I don't mind if you yell, Algernon," he said kindly. "I should say that door was almost soundproof, but in any case it'd be quite good local colour."