Under these circumstances, Gerald Staunton only waited till he was out of danger to marry Lady Eveline Derrick. The Dowager Countess was hotly angry, her husband's relations coldly and implacably indignant, and her children were told never to speak of the mother whom they never saw again. None of her friends or acquaintances could countenance Lady Eveline after the terrible indecorum of which she had been guilty, and Gerald Staunon's only sister was as angry at what had taken place as Lady Gower was. Her brother might have done so much better; the connection would ruin him, and so in a pecuniary point of view it did.
He obtained employment at some drudging literary work. Lady Eveline dropped her title, and dropped very soon out of the remembrance of society. As her father was no longer the Earl, the book of the peerage was cleared of her name, and she lived obscurely in a quiet street in London, and tried the reverse of the picture, where there was little but love to brighten her life.
Gerald might have regretted the relinquishment of his ambitious hopes and the nameless career that circumstances had hurried him into, but he was too generous ever to reproach his wife with it.
