This noon he felt breathless, confused. It was as though something opaque kept flicking back and forth across his eyes, clouding his vision. He could not concentrate; felt he could not bear to step into a room, shut the door, and sit down to a desk. He knew he would be useless, that he would accomplish nothing, so he headed on out Woodward Avenue, not turning east at the Boulevard. He wanted to get away from human beings, to be alone and to quiet himself. The calm of the country drew him, and he longed, without realizing his longing, for the soothing hand of open places and sweet air. He even thought of playing golf--a round of golf would settle him down, and he could make up for it by added hours of work that night. He passed through Highland Park at a speed which excited the interest of traffic officers. When he left Royal Oak he stepped on the gas pedal with a fierce, breathless enjoyment of the excitement of high speed. Beyond Birmingham, once a distant village, now a suburb of Detroit, he turned westward over the road that led to the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. There he parked his car and, without caddy or companion, strode out upon the links, playing savagely, rapidly. Only here and there was a player. Potter encountered no one until he was well away from the clubhouse. Then ahead of him he saw a man and girl, with a second man in chauffeur's livery carrying the caddy bags. He did not glance at them, but played feverishly on until he overtook them sitting on a bench beside the tee.... It was Hildegarde von Essen, Cantor, and Philip, the von Essens' chauffeur. It was like a blow. He had last seen Hildegarde in Washington, and there Hildegarde had repeated her confession--that she loved him and could not marry him because she was fit to be no man's wife. And he had wrung from her, or believed he had wrung from her, the admission that Cantor was the cause of her catastrophe.... And here he found her with the man, chaperoned by a chauffeur, playing golf as casually as if the man had a right to her companionship and friendship; as if he were not something that should be inexpressibly repulsive to her, terrible to contemplate. Potter stopped fifty feet away from them and glared. It was unthinkable, searing. In his soul he could not believe that relations could have continued, yet what else did the fact indicate? Opaque blurs danced before his eyes; he felt a geyser of passion boiling up within him, a geyser of rage and horror, mingled with the agony of a love such as only a man of his temperament could know. It was not given to him ever to count costs, to look to the future, to perceive results. Now he had but one thought--that Cantor was there, that he hated Cantor, that the Lord had delivered Cantor into his hands. He strode forward and confronted Hildegarde.