“Foolish boy; they are too strong for you. Your worst enemies could wish nothing worse for you than that you should provoke them.” In saying these words she was so much more kind and womanly that Alfred conceived hopes, and burst out, “Oh, madam, you are human then; you seem to pity me; pray give me pen and paper, and let me write to my friends to get me out of this terrible place; do not refuse me.” Mrs. Archbold resumed her distant manner without apparent effort: she said nothing, but she placed writing materials before him. She then left the room, and locked him in. He wrote a few hasty ardent words to Julia, telling her how he had been entrapped, but not a word about his sufferings--he was too generous to give her needless pain--and a line to Edward, imploring him to come at once with a lawyer and an honest physician, and liberate him. Mrs. Archbold returned soon after, and he asked her if she would lend him sealing-wax: “I dare not trust to an envelope in such a place as this,” said he. She lent him sealing-wax. “But how am I to post it?” said he. “Easily: there is a box in the house; I will show you.” She took him and showed him the box: he put his letters into it, and in the ardour of his gratitude kissed her hand. She winced a little and said, “Mind, this is not by my advice; I would never tell my friends I had been in a madhouse; oh, never. I would be calm, make friends with the servants--they are the real masters--and never let a creature know where I had been.” “Oh, you don't know my Julia,” said Alfred; “she will never desert me, never think the worse of me because I have been entrapped illegally into a madhouse.” “Illegally, Mr. Hardie! you deceive yourself; Mr. Baker told me the order was signed by a relation, and the certificates by first-rate lunacy doctors.” “What on earth has that to do with it, madam, when I am as sane as you are?” “It has everything to do with it. Mr. Baker could be punished for confining a madman in this house without an order and two certificates; but he couldn't for confining a sane person under an order and two certificates.” Alfred could not believe this, but she convinced him that it was so. Then he began to fear he should be imprisoned for years: he turned pale, and looked at her so piteously, that to soothe him she told him sane people were never kept in asylums now; they only used to be.