Yet Usher's threat agitated him more than he dared confess. He had never defied him before on that point. For a moment he was racked with a spasm of fear lest Sylvester should know the secret of his relations with Usher. The fear had grown with the years into the roots of his life, had become an unreasoning terror. To save his son the knowledge, he had been killing himself by inches with work and worry. Suddenly he rose, shook himself as if impatient of the clinging doubts, and walked briskly across the lawn. Usher daren't do it, for his own sake. Usher turned the corner of the house and met him by the door. Matthew frowned and regarded him angrily. “I told you to go and be damned to you,” he said. “You made use of improper language, Matthew. You lost your temper. I never lose my temper. I am a most peaceful man. And I forgive. It is a Christian virtue. I thought you might change your mind on reflection.” “I haven't changed my mind,” said Matthew. Usher took an envelope from his pocket, withdrew a letter, and handed it to Matthew. “Would you like me to send that to Sylvester?” Matthew glanced through it; his fingers trembled in spite of his will. But he tore the paper across and across and put the fragments into his jacket-pocket. “You would not be such a fool as to kill the goose with the golden eggs,” he said. “I thought you would do that,” said Usher, drawing another paper from his pocket; “but I have prepared a duplicate. I have always been a man of foresight. It is my firm intention to post this to Sylvester unless you give me your written consent to the marriage. I do not want money, Matthew. I have earned enough to keep me in comfort for the rest of my old age, and your promise to help my poor boy was based on no conditions. All the country says you are an upright man, Matthew. When I mentioned the five thousand pounds to-day, I was forgetting your scrupulous honour. I apologise. I always apologise when I am wrong. I am a just man.” All through this harangue Matthew's stern gaze had never left the puffy, white-bearded, common face. And he saw, not for the first time, beneath the old man's dull and red-rimmed eyes, a hard gleam of hate. But for the first time he realised that even to such a man there might be something dearer even than money, and the chill fear fastened round his heart. He made an impatient movement across the threshold of the open door. “Come into the library,” he said. “It is an insult to God's sweet air to discuss such things here.”