"Then you cannot help me!" and poor Margaret, who had hoped much from him, felt cruelly disappointed.
"How can I help you?" he asked, impatiently. "You wish me, _for some reason of your own_, to say that your husband is mad--which I have seen nothing to prove--and I will _not_ say what I do not believe."
"I do not wish you to say it; I wish nothing but what is true and right: but I cannot understand how you, a medical man and experienced, can think Mr. Drayton quite right," pleaded Margaret; "if you could only see him as I have seen him!" and she stopped, afraid of betraying emotion to one so evidently lacking in sympathy.
"Of course, if I saw him with your eyes," began the doctor, coldly, all the more upon his guard because he was conscious that in spite of disapproval, in spite of what he knew and what he had seen, he was beginning to be influenced by her passionate appeal to him.
"We need not discuss this matter any longer," said Margaret, rising, and looking very fair and very pale as she stood in the full morning light. "For some unknown reason--unknown to me--you are not my friend; after all, you do not know me. If I find my life unbearable, I have friends who will help me!"
"Now, Mrs. Drayton, answer me a plain question," and the doctor, rising also, looked at her with a curious expression of mingled distrust and rising interest, "What have you to complain of? Is your husband rough to you. Has he ever done you any injury?"
"He is rough," she said, with hesitation in her voice; "he uses language new to me. But if you can see no strangeness in his manner...." Her voice died away, her hopes had vanished; she had a horrible and undefinable dread--she had seen a wildness in his eyes, which in a less degree she had seen when she had first known him; but our own convictions, unsupported by any facts, are inconclusive to other people--and Dr. Jones, seeing in her a very lovely woman, but one evidently able to deceive, and who did not hesitate to say she had no liberty, when he had seen her alone and out, was steeled against her.
He laid down the law with all the authority of a man who is fully aware of having right on his side.
"Madam, if you have any one tangible grievance--if your husband ever struck you, or ill-treated you in any way--then I should see my way to interfering in your behalf; the law protects you in such a case."