Fairfax's hand was listlessly touched by his friend's, then Rainsford went over and took Molly's place by the lamp. Fairfax checked the words, "Not _there_, for God's sake, Rainsford!" He thought, "Let the living come. Nothing can brush away the image of her sitting there in the lamplight, no matter how many fill the place." Rainsford's eyes were hollow, and his tone as pale as his face, whose sunken cheeks and hollows, to Fairfax, marked the progress of a fatal disease. His voice sounded hoarse and strained; he spoke with effort. "I've come to say good-bye. I've given up my job here in West Albany. I'm going to try another country, Tony." The sculptor sat down on the lounge where he had used to sit near his wife, and said solicitously-- "I see you're not well, old man. I don't wonder you're going to try a better climate. I hope to heaven I shall never see another snow-flake fall. I assure you I feel them fall on graves." There was a moment's silence. The agent passed his hand across his face and said, as if reluctant to speak at all-- "Yes, I am going to try another country." He glanced at Fairfax and coughed. "California?" questioned Antony. "I hope you'll get a job in some such paradise. Do you think you will?" The other man did not reply. He looked about the studio, now living-room and workshop, and said-- "I should like to see what you have been doing, Fairfax. How are you getting on?" Tony, however, did not rise from the sofa nor show any inclination to comply, and his friend irrelevantly, as though he took up the young man's problems where he had left them, before his own sentiment for Molly had estranged him from her husband-- "You must be pretty hard up by now, Tony." He drew from his waistcoat pocket his wallet, and took out a roll of bills which he folded mechanically and held in his transparent hand. "Ever since the day you came in to take your orders from me in West Albany, I've wanted to help you. Now I've got the money to do so, old man." "No, my kind friend." "Don't refuse me then, if I am that." The other's lip twitched. "Take it, Tony." "You mustn't ask me to, Peter." "I made a turnover last week in N. Y. U. I can afford it. I ask you for the sake of old times." Fairfax covered the slender hand with his. He shook it warmly. "I'm sorry, old man. I can't do it." The near-sighted eyes of the paymaster met those of Fairfax with a melancholy appeal, and the other responded to his unspoken words-- "No, Rainsford, not for anything in the world." "It's your _Pride_," Rainsford murmured, and he put on his shining glasses and looked through them fully at Fairfax. "It's your Pride, Tony. What are you going to do?" For answer, Fairfax rose, stretched out his arms, walked toward his covered bas-relief and drew away the curtain.