As it was he associated himself with company after company, and then almost wept for those who lost their little savings, their policies of insurance, their deposits, and their incomes. Whoever else might be to blame in the affair, he never was. He was always deceived; if there were one especial enterprise in which Mr. Asherill had invested his largest stock of faith, it always proved to be that which came to the most utter grief, which collapsed with the mightiest shock. Not only this, but the amount of money Mr. Asherill, according to his own showing, lost on each of these occasions was positively appalling. He would shake his head and beg that the subject might not be mentioned to him, it was all so terrible; and then he would contrive to drop a hint as to how far he was "in," and the majority of people believed him, and the minority who did not believe was too small to count. After that especial Friday, in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, when, had any former citizen liked to get out of his coffin in the vaults of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, adjacent to the notorious Corner House, he might have fancied a second South Sea Bubble had just burst, after that Black Afternoon which brought ruin to thousands, Mr. Asherill quietly packed up a few clothes and left town. Perhaps he had been waiting for some such opportunity; perhaps some stray brick of that mighty pile touched him. Be this as it may, he went quietly down to Lewes, got himself decorously arrested and lodged in gaol, and then without the slightest fuss or useless publicity passed his examination, received his certificate, joined his wife at Brighton, and spent the summer at the sea-side. It was then he became a Christian and began to wear white neckcloths. As he said it himself, there can be no harm in my remarking that up to the period of Overend and Gurney's collapse, he had not been a Christian. He was not one when he visited Lewes--he was not one when he reached Brighton, where, after more than a quarter of a century's bad health, his wife was at length dying with a commendable if late rapidity. Whilst engaged in this occupation, she made the acquaintance of a widow lady, who was serious and possessed of an ample competency, and who being, moreover, amiably and charitably disposed, took the invalid drives, and furnished her with many luxuries and comforts to which she had always latterly been accustomed, but which, in the then state of the Asherill finances, she might otherwise have sighed for in vain. When Mr. Asherill once more returned to business--the City, his old haunts, and companions--he was a changed man. If he had been respectable before, he was ten times more respectable now. He was a widower, and he mourned for his deceased wife in a hat-band a foot deep, in black clothes of the best quality and of regular City make; in jet studs, a ring containing her hair, and a white cravat which would have made the fortune of an undertaker.