Cater himself had grown 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 appeared 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, who, with the folds of his blue dressing-gown around him, had the unnatural surroundings of the flowered-chintz-covered bedroom furniture, and Lois’ swinging-glassed, mahogany dressing-table with its silver appointments. The room had already the cleared-up neatness with which one prepares for illness, with everything irrelevant put away. A cluster of white tulips was in a thin glass vase on the mantel; the shades were drawn to an inch, so that an unglaring yet dimly cheerful light came through them; on the little mahogany stand by Cater there was a glass of water and a watch, ticking face upward. Cater’s elbow jostled into the light table as he turned, and he steadied it before bracing himself to go on. “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.”