Severus pulls up before the door (or the box) can knock him over as Q comes in. "You seem to have had some success," he notes, rapidly pulling himself together, nearly lightheaded with relief at the reprieve from talking about his own snakebite, burying furious shame at his own hypocrisy at pressing the visitor to talk about his own unpleasant memory and then being unable to manage it himself--not to mention at having been such a grass-green garter naif as to have let the conversation get away from him like that. "This gentleman," here waving a hand at the as-yet unidentified Sirius, "claims a method for retrieving one's own books out of any library."