And Simon, at length sufficiently emboldened, seized the letter and read: 

    ’SIR,

’Mr. Polycarp has just been here, and accidentally left behind him keys of his vault, including safe of late Mr. Francis Tudor, etc.  In these peculiar circumstances I shall be glad to know what I am to do.

    ’Yours respectfully,

    ’H.  BROWN,

    ’Head Guardian,

    ‘Hugo’s Safe Deposit.’

‘What on earth can Brown be thinking about?’ muttered Simon.  ’Hadn’t he got enough gumption to send a messenger after Mr. Polycarp, without troubling the governor?  He’ll catch it.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Lily sharply.  ’Run down to the Safe Deposit.  Run, Simon.’

It was as though a delay of minutes might mean ruin.  Who could say what was even then happening in the disorganized and masterless departments?

CHAPTER XII

SAFE DEPOSIT

The Safe Deposit at Hugo’s was perhaps the most wonderful of all the departments.  Until Hugo thought of it, and paid a trinity of European experts to design and devise it, there had existed no such thing as an absolutely impregnable asylum for valuables.  In Dakota a strong-room alleged to be impregnable had been approached underground, tunnelled, mined, and emptied by thieves with imagination.  In the North of England a safe, which its inventor had defied the whole universe of crime to open, had been rifled by the aid of so simple a dodge as duplicate keys.  Even in Tottenham Court Road a couple of ingenious persons had burnt a hole in a guaranteed safe by means of common gas at three and threepence per thousand cubic feet.  These surprises could not occur at Hugo’s.  His Safe Deposit really was what it pretended to be.  All contingencies were provided for.  It was the final retort of virtue to vice.

You approached it by a door of quite ordinary appearance (no one cares to be seen leaving what is obviously a safe deposit), and you signed your name before entering a lift.  You descended forty feet below the surface of the earth, gave a password on emerging from the lift, traversed a corridor, and at length stood in front of the sole entrance to the Safe Deposit.  A guardian, when you had signed your name again, unlocked three unpickable, incombustible, and gunpowder-proof locks in a massive steel door, and you were admitted, assuming always that the hour was between nine and six.  Out of hours and on Saturday after-noons and on Sundays a time-lock rendered it utterly impossible for any person whatever to turn any key in the Safe Deposit.  Once the lock was set, Hugo himself could not have entered, not even to save the British Empire from instant destruction, until the time-lock had run its course.