He took it, found the envelope was addressed to himself in his father's handwriting. He did not notice that the ink on the envelope was wet, nor that the enclosure had been written some time previously. “I, Matthew Lanyon,” it ran, “of Woodlands, Ayresford, hereby declare that I drew a cheque for £3,000, dated the 10th December, 189-, in favour of Roderick Charles Usher, Esq., of 13 Queen's Park Mansions, London, S. W.” The document was signed by him, and the signature was witnessed by Agatha Lanyon and Mary Evans, the nurse. Like a man in a dream, Sylvester crossed to a little desk by the window, that once had been his mother's, and wrote out a telegram; then a letter with which he enclosed his father's statement. Both he addressed to his solicitor. The gardener was summoned and despatched to the post-office. When he had gone, Sylvester was scarcely conscious of his action. Roderick's fate was of small account compared with the doom that had fallen upon himself. But an hour afterwards Roderick was driving through the London streets, a free man. CHAPTER XX--“OH, WHITE DOVE OF THE PITY DIVINE” But a few minutes had passed since Usher's departure; yet to Sylvester they represented a great chasm of time,--a living self on the one side, a dead self on the other. He walked aimlessly about the room in a curious apathy. That which had been vital to him, his love and reverence for those two,--father and mother,--had been plucked away from him, and it seemed merely some reflex action that maintained organic existence. On the wall facing the fireplace were two companion water-colour portraits in old-fashioned oval frames. He paused before them and looked dully from one to the other. These had been his sacred images in the house, the ikons of his gods. His mother smiled down upon him. Her hair, banded obliquely on either side over her forehead, gave an idea of Madonna-like purity to the delicate contours of her face. That of Botticelli's fair girl-mother betrayed less a soul at war with itself. And it was not the artist's contemporaneous delight in investing feminine portraiture with angelic sentimentality that was at fault. The son remembered her thus in the flesh, though older,--a rare, flower-like woman, with hands that, when they touched him as a boy, seemed holy. She was dead. That other, the young man bright and strong, looking unflinchingly at the world over his absurd black neckcloth, was now an old man, dying. And all that they left was a heritage of shame.