"That will do." To himself he thought with his hand on his brow: "I forgot something about the Castle letters. I forget still what it was. I should have—I remember now. Well, it does not make much difference."
CHAPTER VII.
LOSING.
For a few days after the meeting between Grey and his mother at the Castle he did not go to the Island. Something repelled him. The thought of the Castle made him chill and uncomfortable now. He had never gone so far as to try and persuade himself he was in love with Maud. He never pretended to himself he felt more than a mild interest in her. The nature of the circumstances surrounding him and impelling him towards Maud had almost wholly obliterated the personality of the girl. She was a minus quantity in the equation of his life. Could he bring her over to the other side, the minus would become a plus, and he should be saved. He was too much impressed with the necessity of winning her to regard her personality with much interest.
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."