The boat is in the harbour; the passengers land and hurry to the train. Hubert was almost the only one to halt in the little town. He allowed his trunk to go on to London, and took his seat with his portmanteau in one of the flies standing in front of the terminus. He had felt something like a touch of melancholy when speaking to the driver and thus ascertaining how correct and intelligible his English was, notwithstanding that it was his first journey to England. He recalled his childhood, his Yorkshire governess, his mother's care to make him speak every day. If this poor mother were to see him now! Then these memories were gradually effaced as the light vehicle, drawn by a pony at a trot, briskly climbed the rude ascent by which the upper part of the town is reached. To the left of the young man stretched the wonderful landscape of the sea, an immense gulf of pale green, blending in its extreme line with a gulf of blue, and dotted all over with barques, schooners, and steamers. On the summit the road turned. The carriage left the cliff, entered a street, then a second, and then a third, all lined with low houses, whose projecting windows showed rows of red geraniums and ferns behind their panes. At a turning Hubert perceived the door of a vast Gothic building and a black plate, the mere inscription on which, in its gilt letters, made his heart leap. He found himself in front of the Star Hotel. There was an interval for inquiring at the office whether Madame Sylvie had arrived--this was the name that Theresa had chosen to assume on account of the initials engraven on all her toilet articles, and she was to have been entered in the books as a dramatic artist; for ascending two storeys and passing down a long corridor; then the servant opened the door of a small apartment, and there, seated at a table in a drawing-room, the paleness of her face increased by deep emotion, and her form clad in a garment of a red silky material whose graceful folds outlined without accentuating her figure,--there was Theresa. The coal fire glowed in the fireplace, the inner sides of which were covered with coloured ware. A rotunda-like window, of the kind that the English call "bow windows," was at the end of the apartment, to which the furniture usual in such rooms in Great Britain gave an aspect of quiet homeliness. "Ah! it is really you," said the young man, going up to Theresa, who was smiling at him, and he laid his hand upon his mistress's bosom as though to convince himself of her existence. This gentle pressure enabled him to feel beneath the slight material the passionate beatings of the happy woman's heart. "Yes, it is really I," she replied, with more languor than usual.