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.
He had now a vague fear—it went beyond fear, and assumed the settled form of conviction—that his explanation of his violence had not satisfied Maud. She might really have been indisposed, but of old so slight an indisposition as headache would not have excluded him from her presence. He was quite sure Maud had told him the truth, and that his mother had divulged nothing prejudicial to him. But this was not all. His mother may have divulged nothing, and yet his manner, his terror at the sight of her, his violence when she had gone, and his subsequent statement that litigation was not impossible, might have created an impression not to be removed easily from the mind of the girl.
He allowed a few days more to elapse before calling again.
Mrs. Grant came to him and said Miss Midharst was so miserably wretched and unwell she must ask Mr. Grey to be good enough to excuse her not receiving him.
"I have been very unfortunate with Miss Midharst of late," said the banker, with a smile to the little widow.