"I'll find out," said Dosia, and came down in a moment with the word that Justin would like to see the visitor. Cater himself looked extraordinarily lean and yellow. The fact that his clothes were new and of a fashionable cut seemed only to make him the more grotesque. He looked oddly shrunken; the quality of his smile of greeting seemed to have shrunk also--something had gone out of it. "Well, Cater, you find me down," said Justin, with glittering, cold cheerfulness. "I hope not for long," said the visitor. "Oh, no; but, when I get up, you won't see me going past much longer. I'll soon be out of the old place. I guess the game is up, as far as I'm concerned. Your end is ahead." "Mr. Alexander," began Cater, clearing his throat and bending earnestly toward Justin, "I hope you ain't going to hold it up against me that I had to make a different business deal from what we proposed. I've been thinking about it a powerful lot. There wasn't any written agreement, you know." "No, there was no written agreement," assented Justin; "there was nothing to bind you." "That's what I said to myself. If there had been, I'd 'a' stuck to it, of course. But a man's got to do the best he can for himself in this world." "Has he?" asked the sick man, with an enigmatic, questioning smile. "I'd be mighty sorry to have anything come between us. I reckon I took a shine to you the first day I met up with you," continued Cater helplessly. "I'd be mighty sorry to think we weren't friends." Justin's brilliant eyes surveyed him serenely. Something sadly humorous, yet noble and imposing, seemed to emanate from his presence, weak and a failure though he was. "I can be friends with you, but you can't be friends with me, Cater; it isn't in you to know how," he said. "Good-by." "Well, good-by," said the other, rising, his long, angular figure knocking awkwardly against chairs and tables as he went out, leaving Justin lying there alone, with his head throbbing horribly. Yet, strangely enough, in spite of it, his mind felt luminously clear, in that a certain power seemed to have come to him--a power of correlating all the events of the past eighteen months and placing them in their relative sequence. A certain faith--the candid, boyish, unquestioning faith in the adequacy of his knowledge of those whom he had called his friends--was gone; the face of Leverich came to him, brutal in its unveiled cupidity, showing what other men felt but concealed; yet his own faith in honor and honesty remained, stronger and higher than ever before. Nothing, he knew, could take it from him; it was a faith that he had won from the battle with his own soul.