Evie lay awake for a long time that night. Christina was certainly a strange girl--and when she said she did not love Sault, she was not speaking the truth. That was just how she had felt, when Christina had hinted that Ronnie was not sincere. Only she had been too much of a a lady to lose her temper. About old Sault, too! What did he do for a living? She must ask Christina. XII Mr. Jan Steppe sat astride of a chair, his elbows on the back-rest, his saturnine face clouded with doubt. "It certainly looks like a very ordinary safe to me, Sault. Do you mean to say that an expert could not get inside without disturbing the apparatus, huh?" "Impossible," replied Sault. "I have filled the top chamber with water and I have tried at least a thousand combinations and every time I put the combination wrong, the safe has been flooded." He twisted the dials on the face of the unpretentious repository, until he brought five letters, one under the other, in line with an arrow engraved on the safe door. He was a long time doing this and Steppe and the Greek watched hm. "Now!" said Sault. He turned the handle and the door swung open. The contents were two or three old newspapers and they were intact. "What is the code word?" Steppe peered forward. "Huh--why did you choose that word, Sault?" "It is one of the very few words I can spell. Besides which, each letter is different." "It is not an inappropriate word," said Moropulos amused, "and one easy to remember. I intend pasting a notice on the safe, Steppe, explaining frankly that unless the code word is used, and if any other combination of letters is tried, indeed, if the handle is turned, whilst the dial is set at any other word than the code word, the contents of the safe are destroyed. This may act as a deterrent to promiscuous burglars." Steppe fingered his stubbly beard. "That will be telling people that we have something in the safe that we want to keep hidden, huh?" he said dubiously, "a fool idea!" "Everybody has something in his safe that he wants to keep hidden," said the other coolly. "Now let me try--shut the door, Sault, that is right." Steppe got out of the chair to spin the dials. "Now we will suppose that I am some unauthorized person trying to find a way of opening the safe. So!" He turned the handle. "Open it." Sault worked at the dials and presently the door swung open. The newspapers were saturated and an inch of water at the bottom of the safe splashed out and into a bath-tub that Sault had put ready. "How about cutting into the safe? Suppose I am a burglar, huh? I burn out the lock or the side, and don't touch the combination?" "I have left a hole in one side of the safe," said Sault, and pointed to a rubber plug that had been rammed into a small aperture. With a pair of pincers he pulled this out and a stream of water spurted forth and was mostly caught in the can he held.