At Chicago De Launay again showed himself in what she supposed was his true light. He had seen her to a hotel for the two or three hours they had to wait there and had escorted her back to her train again. While she was settling herself in her compartment she chanced to look out of the window before the train left the station and perceived her escort conversing with an individual who was not prepossessing. It was a short, broad man, dressed roughly, wearing boots covered by his trousers and with a handkerchief knotted about his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hat, old and battered, its brim curled disreputably at all angles. She perceived that, after a few words together, this fellow and De Launay appeared to be on the best of terms, shaking hands cordially, conversing with much laughter and an occasional slap on the back. Finally the man, in the shelter of a truck loaded with baggage, produced a bottle from his hip pocket and offered it to De Launay who, with a preliminary salute, lifted it to his mouth. After which he wiped the neck of it with his hand and passed it back, the man duplicating his action. The train was about to start and, with a few hilarious farewells, they parted and De Launay rolled in her direction while the other tramp strolled away at a gait very much like the general's. Two of a kind, she thought, bitterly; two ruffians who were hail-fellow-well-met--and she was married to one of them! A soldier of France, a distinguished general, to descend to this level! It was almost inconceivable. But the train started and the long journey began. Hour after hour the landscape flashed past the windows. Day faded to night, and Solange slept as best she could on the reeling train. In the morning she awoke to pass another weary time of gazing from the windows at the endless checkerboard of prairie farms rolling past, divided into monotonous squares by straight, dusty roads, each with its house and big red barn forming an exact replica of every other. She ate and dozed, tried to read a magazine but found the English more than usually difficult to understand, though ordinarily she read it with facility. Now her thoughts were in French and they persisted in coming back to her mission and to the man who accompanied her.