He continued to speak to her in English, except for his native _liebchens_, to show off his perfect familiarity with her language. For he entirely abandoned all pretense of believing her anything but American. Near Lauengratz, he informed her, was his favorite estate, where, when he wished, even the war would not unpleasantly intrude; he trusted that she would have the good sense to wish to visit Lauengratz. Dawn was brightening, and Wessels--Ruth did not yet know his true name--switched off the lights in the compartment, lifted the curtains and motioned to the right and ahead, where, along the length of Baden, lay the wooded hills of his Schwarzwald--the Black Forest. The gray light, sweeping over the sky, showed Ruth the wooded slopes reaching down toward the Rhine, which had formed the Swiss-German boundary at Basel, but which now flowed almost due north between the German grand duchy of Baden and the German Imperial Territory of Alsace, within the western edge of which now ran the French and American battle line. Four railroads, Ruth knew, reached from Basel into Germany--one west of the Rhine to Mühlhausen; one almost due east and up the river valley to the Rhinefall; one northeast to Todtnau; the other north and parallel with the Rhine to Freiburg and Karlsruhe. The train evidently was traveling this last road with the Rhine valley dimly in sight to the west. There had come to Ruth the wholly irrational sensation that Germany, when at last seen, must appear a land distinct from all others; but nothing in this quiet countryside, which was disclosing itself to greater and greater distance under the brightening dawn, was particularly alarming or peculiar. She viewed a fair and beautiful land of forest, and farm, and tiny, neat villages very like the Swiss, and with not so many soldiers in evidence about them as Ruth had noticed upon the Swiss side of the frontier. Perhaps it was the appearance of this fair, quiet countryside which spared Ruth from complete dismay; perhaps, deep within her, she had always realized that her venture must prove inevitably fatal, and this realization now controlled her reactions as well as her conscious thought; perhaps she was one of those whom despair amazingly arms with coolness and resource. “I will go with you to Lauengratz,” Ruth replied. “That’s good!” He patted the seat beside him. “Come back here now.” Ruth recognized that she must obey or he would seize her; so she returned to the other seat and suffered his arm about her. “You do not recall me, _Liebchen_?” he asked indulgently. He referred, obviously, to some encounter previous to their very recent meetings in Lucerne. Ruth could recollect no such occasion, but she feared to admit it lest she offend his vanity. And, indeed, now that he suggested that they had met before, his features became to her, not familiar, but it seemed that she had seen him before. “Didn’t I see you in Paris, Herr Baron?” she ventured boldly.