“This is my engagement ring,” she said.  “It’s a very precious symbol, for Quimbleton explained to me that the amethyst is a talisman against drunkenness.  I looked it up in the dictionary, and found that he was right.  As long as I wear this ring the departed spirits have no ill effect upon me.  But I sometimes wonder,” she added with a sigh, “whether Virgil really loves me for myself, or only as a kind of swinging door into the spirit world.”

The car was now approaching an open belt of country.  Behind them lay the dark line of pine woods; far off, across a wide shimmer of sun and sandy fields sweetened by purple clover; and flowering grasses, was a blue ribbon of sea.  But even in this remote shelf of New Jersey the implacable hand of Chuff was at work.  From a meadow near by they saw an observation balloon going up and the windlass unwinding its cable.  A huge paraboloid breath-detector (or breathoscope) was stationed on a low ridge.  This terribly ingenious machine, which had just been invented by the pan-antis, records the vibrations of any alcoholic breath within five miles, and indicates on a sensitive dial the exact direction and distance of the breath.  It was only too evident that the search for Quimbleton was going forward with fierce system.  In the shelter of an old barn they heard a cork-popping machine-gun going off rapidly.  This was one of the most atrocious ruses employed by the chuffs in their search for conscientious drinkers.  The gun fires no projectile, but produces a pleasant detonation like the swift and repeated drawing of corks.  Set up in the neighborhood of any bottle-habited man, it will invariably lure him into an approach.  Near it was an ice-tinkling device, used for the same purposes of stratagem.

“Poor Virgil!” said Miss Chuff with a sigh.  “I’m afraid he has had a grievous ordeal.  We must run carefully now, so as not to give him away.”

Fortunately Miss Chuff’s presence at the wheel, and Bleak’s credentials as war correspondent, enabled them to pass several scouting parties of chuff uhlans without suspicion.  In this way they neared the extensive grounds surrounding the Federal Home for Inebriates, Cana, N. J. This magnificent Gothic building, already showing some signs of decay from two years of vacancy, stands on a slight eminence among what the real estate agents call “old shade,” with a fine and carefully calculated view over one of the largest bodies of undrinkable fluid known to man, the Atlantic Ocean.

The car turned into a narrow sandy road skirting one side of the walled park.  This byway was completely screened from outside observation by the high bulwark of the Home and by thick masses of rhododendron shrubbery.  At a bend in the road Miss Chuff halted the motor, and motioned Bleak to descend.

“Now we will look for the persecuted patriot,” she said.

Bleak took charge of the basket of food, and Miss Chuff drew a small rope ladder from a locker under the driver’s seat.  This she threw deftly up to the top of the wall, hooking it upon the iron spikes.  Bleak politely ascended first, and they scaled the wall, dropping down into a tangle of underbrush.