This dénouement had for its stage one of those spots where it seems least likely that words of a certain sort can be spoken: a room in a hotel at Liverpool, that city on the bank of the Mersey, the immense mart of England's commerce, one of the extremities of a vast moving street of steamships and sailing vessels, of which the other ends are Boston and New York! City of docks and railway-stations, of smoke and speed, panting with the travail of a world, with its irregular and chaotic structures of brick and stone, built in haste, above which the finest days spread only a mistily blue sky, dimmed by clouds of vapor. It was such a veiled, uncertain sky that Landri and Valentine saw through the bow-window of a small parlor in that hotel, at which they had alighted the day before. They were awaiting the time to go on board the boat that was to take them in six days to New York, whence they were to journey, via Montreal, to Ottawa, to prepare for their permanent establishment. Little Ludovic had insisted upon going with his tutor on board the steamer, which the husband and wife--they had been married ten days--could see at the dock, within a few rods of the hotel. The huge vessel was called the Cambria, the Latin name of the principality of Wales. She was of thirty-two thousand five hundred tons, with engines of seventy thousand horse-power; seven hundred and eighty feet long and eighty-eight feet beam. Her vast black hull towered above the gray water of the river, swollen by the rising of the tide. A floating palace, pierced by innumerable port-holes, and dominated by four huge smoke-stacks, reared its white walls above the waterline. Locomotives whistled. Tram-cars ran along their electric wires, with a snapping noise. Between the hotel and the landing-stage were travellers going to and fro, giving orders, looking after their trunks, or hailing porters. Valentine had sent her maid on before, so that not even a package was left in that empty parlor whose dark mahogany furniture emphasized its depressing commonness. How far away they were, she from her homelike little sanctuary on Rue Monsieur, he from the magnificence of Grandchamp and Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré! That contrast was the anticipatory reflection of the exile that Landri had desired and she had agreed to. The melancholy aspect of their surroundings intensified the distress with which the young man was weighed down. He was thinking of M. de Claviers, and he said to his wife:-- "You see, he has not even given me a sign of life. If he had intended to write he would have written to London. He knew my whole route, day by day, hour by hour, but not a word, not a sign that he retains even a little of the old affection!"