Now he seemed to have receded further from her. He was no less impressed with the necessity of winning her than before, but between her and him had come of late a shadow, stretching from that interview at which his mother, Maud, and himself, had assisted. At first this shadow was vague, indistinct, a source of indefinable uneasiness rather than absolute pain. Gradually, hour by hour after that interview, his subsequent discoveries in the fly, and at Evans's office, the appearance of vagueness disappeared, the repelling image took absolute form, and between the girl and himself flitted the form of a feeble beggared mother. He had made no effort to trace Mrs. Grey. He knew nothing on earth would induce her to take aid from him. He knew she could not be reached indirectly, for she would suspect any side approach to be of his contriving. When she would not keep a shilling of her own honest money to buy bread, there was no likelihood of her receiving stolen money from his hand. "I have already sacrificed two women, am I about to sacrifice a third?" He put this question to himself often, but took little interest in the answer. If any other means of extricating himself offered, he would have abandoned his design of marrying Maud. He saw no other loophole of escape. "If I don't marry Maud, sooner or later it will be found out I have made fraudulent uses of my power of attorney, and they will seize me, search the Bank and the Manor, and--hang me out of one of the crossbars of that tank--always supposing I do not take the liberty of cheating the hangman by making away with myself." He began to feel jaded, and people saw changes in him, and asked him if he was quite well. When not racked by dread or torn by remorse, a strange languor fell upon him, and he could not rouse himself to do anything not absolutely necessary. In these languid moments he would think to himself: "I have been over-trained by crime, and I am not capable of fighting as of old." The first day he called at the Castle after meeting his mother there, Maud could not be seen. She sent down Mrs. Grant to say she hoped Mr. Grey would excuse her, as she had a headache, and Mrs. Grant had recommended her to keep to her room. This was an agreeable disappointment. He had come to the Island and requested he might see Maud, not as a matter of liking at the moment, but as part of a scheme of self-protection laid down when full of life and vigour, and now carried out with diminished forces. He formally examined the work upon which the men were engaged, and took an early leave of the Island. A meeting with Maud that day would have been too much for him. He did not feel equal to urging his suit; allusion might have been made to his manner on the last occasion, and he felt he could not carry off the fiction of the imaginary dispute of the will with a hand sufficiently light and firm.