For the thief was in the house already: Lanyard's first cast across the lawns at the wing that held the library--with whose location Morphew's ground plan of the dwelling had made him acquainted--had been repaid by discovery of a lancing play of light in the dark beyond the windows, the thin, broken and restless, blue-white blade of an electric torch in hands either cynically indifferent to detection, or absurdly amateurish.
He would be in time--perhaps. If so, with none to spare. He pelted madly toward the veranda, took its steps at a stride and, with calculated intent to make all the noise he could and bring the household down about his ears and that other's, battered a shoulder like a ram against the joint in the middle of the nearest window.
It gave with an ease he hadn't discounted, its wings flew open with a sounding crash; and tripping on the sill Lanyard tumbled in on all fours, while the walls bellowed with the report of a pistol, and broken glass showered about him, tinkling and clashing.
Instantly he reared up on his knees, as a man will when mortally hit, flopped to one side, out of that too exposed position in front of the window, and lay very still, his own pistol ready, his vision probing the obscurity for some sign of stir.
The electric torch defeated that effort. It had been dropped with switch set, at the instant of Lanyard's violent entrance, and now lay at some distance in from the windows, its beam steadfast to the front of an opened safe; manufacturing a wide patch of vivid colour that made the encompassing mirk more dense, too dense for penetration by merely mortal eyes. Lanyard, at least, could see nothing else; and though he distinctly heard the pile of a rug whisper to a movement of sly feet, it passed his perceptions to determine the quarter in which that rustle had its rise. It ceased of a sudden, and he heard nothing more, other than the swish and flap of the curtain bellying in from the shattered window.
The burglar hadn't left by way of any window, he was certain; therefore was still in the room, waiting like Lanyard for some incautious sign to guide his aim. But to play a waiting game with him would be intolerable, and too apt, as well, to end in precisely that which Lanyard was bent on preventing, the intrusion of some member of the household to draw the marauder's fire. The raving of the wind in the trees made it impossible to distinguish lesser sounds from beyond those four walls; but it was hardly conceivable that the rending crash with which the window had admitted Lanyard, the shot that had followed, and that loud rain of splintered glass, should have failed to alarm every inmate of the house.