And he did it! For two successive summers Mrs. Ashurst went to Ems with the old nurse who had brought her up, and accompanied her from her pretty river-side home to Helmingham; and at the end of the second season she returned comparatively well and strong. But she needed all her strength and health when she looked at her husband, who came to meet her in London, and found him thin, changed, round-shouldered, and hollow-eyed, the very shadow of his former self. James Ashurst had carried through his plans as regarded his wife at enormous sacrifice. He had no ready money to meet the sudden call upon his purse which such an expedition rendered necessary, and he had recourse to money-lenders to raise the first loans required, then to friends to pay the interest on and obtain renewals of these loans, then to other moneylenders to replace the original sums, and to other friends to repay a portion of the first friendly loans, until by the time his wife returned from the second visit to the Continent he found himself so inextricably involved that he dare not face his position, dare not think of it himself, much less have taken her into his confidence, and so went blindly on, paying interest on interest, and hoping ever with a vague hope for some relief from his troubles. That relief never came to James Ashurst in his lifetime. He struggled on in the same hopeless, helpless, hand-to-mouth fashion for about eight years more, always impecunious in the highest degree, always intending to retrieve his fallen fortune, always slowly but surely breaking and becoming less and less of a man under the harass of pecuniary troubles, when the illness which for some time had threatened him set in, and, as we have seen, he died. CHAPTER III. MARIAN.