CHAPTER IV.
On the appointed Monday we were ready to accompany my aunt to the madhouse.
Whether she distrusted her own unaided judgment, or whether she wished to have as many witnesses as possible to the rash action in which she was about to engage, I cannot say.

In either case, her first proceeding was to include Mr.Hartrey and Fritz Keller in the invitation already extended to the lawyer and myself.
They both declined to accompany us.

The head-clerk made the affairs of the office serve for his apology, it was foreign post day, and he could not possibly be absent from his desk.

Fritz invented no excuses; he confessed the truth, in his own outspoken manner.

"I have a horror of mad people," he said, "they so frighten and distress me, that they make me feel half mad myself.