“It is the best procedure,” Mrs. Folwell said half seriously to Ruth upon her arrival, “to lay out all your correspondence upon your table when you leave the room so that it may be examined, in your absence, with the least possible disturbance. They will see it anyway.” Ruth was quite willing. Indeed, she was desirous of advertising, as quickly as possible, the presence of “Cynthia Gail.” She had taken the trouble to learn a simple device, employing ordinary toilet powder and pin perforations through sheets of paper, which would disclose whether the pages of a letter had been disturbed. Accordingly she prepared her letters, and, merely locking them in her bureau drawer, she left them in her room. Returning some hours later, and unlocking the drawer, she found all her letters apparently undisturbed; but the powder and the perforation proved competent to evidence that secret examination had been made. Of course examination might have been at the hands of allied agents; for Ruth did not imagine that the Germans and Austrians alone concerned themselves with war-time visitors to Switzerland; but she felt sure that the Germans had made their search also. After breakfast the next morning Ruth met a man of twenty-eight or thirty--tall, reddish-haired, and with small gray eyes by name Christian Wessels, known as a Norwegian gentleman who had made himself agreeable to the Americans at the hotel. He was an ardent admirer of American policies and could repeat verbatim the statement of American war aims given by President Wilson to Congress three months before. He was a young man of culture, having graduated from the Swedish University of Upsala and was now corresponding with the University of Copenhagen. He proved to be a man of cosmopolitan acquaintance who had visited London, New York, San Francisco. He spoke English perfectly; and he nursed profound, personal antipathy to Germany as his family fortunes had suffered enormously through the torpedoing of Norwegian ships; moreover, he himself had been traveling from England to Bergen when his ship was destroyed and he had been exposed to winter weather in an open boat for five days before being picked up. He was only now recuperating from the effects of that exposure, meanwhile carrying on certain economic studies to guide trade relations after the war. His method of recuperation, Ruth observed, was to eat as heavily and as often as occasions permitted; he was a sleek, sensuous young man, ease-loving and, by his own account, a connoisseur of the arts. He talked informatively about painting, as about politics. Ruth did not like him; but when she encountered him as she was wandering about alone gazing at the quaint houses in the interior of the old town, she could not be too rude to him when he offered himself as a guide. “You have seen the Kapellbrücke, Miss Gail?” “Yes; of course,” Ruth said. “And the historical paintings? You understand them?” “Yes,” Ruth asserted again. “To what do they refer?”