When Eugene spoke to Nellie on the subject of his father's conversation with him, she confirmed his anticipations, and said: "You know, Eugene, that five hundred pounds a year is a great deal more than a girl like me could ever reasonably have hoped for. Why, it's a small fortune to one who has been a poor governess, and who never knew what it was to have even one hundred pounds a year." He took her in his arms and kissed her, and called her his own true, loyal darling, his best of girls, his wisest sweetheart, his only sweetheart. "And if the worst comes to the worst, Nellie, even supposing that the Lavirotte affair never turns up, you know I am young and once more strong, and if we had to go to America, love, I could hoe a field, or split rails, or conduct a car, or heave on a winch, or get a crust for the two of us somehow; and if the two of us mean, above all things, to be together, what are all other things to us compared to our being together?" She was of the same opinion, and so it was settled that at the end of the month to which the marriage had been postponed, it should take place as quietly as possible, but otherwise as though no trouble had overtaken the house of O'Donnell. By this time Lavirotte was established in London. Lionel Crawford had taken lodgings for Dora in Charterhouse Square, and Lavirotte lived in one of the streets leading from the Strand towards the river. John Cassidy was now regularly installed in his London situation, and had taken a genteel lodging in Bloomsbury. His fellow clerks did not, as a rule, live so near the great centre of London. They had rooms in Peckham, Islington, Kennington, and such ungenteel neighbourhoods. But no man with any pretensions to be handsome, a gentleman, and a lady-killer, could condescend to associate his name with such haunts of rabble London as Peckham, Islington, and Kennington. Up to this he had not been able to devote much time to what he was pleased to call "the Lavirotte mystery." A variety of other matters claimed his most careful attention. On his arrival in London, he found that his coats, and collars, and ties, and socks, although the very best that his money would allow him to get in Rathclare, were not at all the right things for a man of his antecedents in the matter of the fair sex. His clothes were, it is true, equal if not superior to those worn by the mere common, ordinary clerks with whom he was bound to associate, and whose coarse and ungenteel ways he was for a portion of the day obliged to endure. But then the clothes, which in Rathclare had been those of a man of distinguished fashion, were, to his chagrin, in London no more than those proper to a mere common clerk. This was a terrible revelation to a sensitive soul.