Potter turned and looked at Hildegarde, looked at her as a man looks at a loved face that is vanishing forever out of his life. Then he turned on his heel and walked unsteadily away. He went straight to his car, stopping for nothing, and drove it out into the road. His sensation was as if his mind were alive in a dead body. But the mind was alive, queerly, keenly alive, and, strangely, it was not busied with Hildegarde von Essen, but with Cantor. He was recalling the day his 'plane had swooped to destruction on that little island in the waste of Muscamoot Bay; he was recalling that moment of consciousness after the fall and how a man had appeared and bent over him.... When he had awakened just now he had fancied for a moment it was that same catastrophe, that he had fallen from his 'plane, and was looking up into the face of the man who had stood above him.... And he knew, he knew past all doubt and disbelief, that the two men were the same. Cantor had been on that island. Cantor had conveyed himself and Hildegarde to the hospital, had moved the wrecked aeroplane to the distant shores of Baltimore Bay.... Cantor had kept hidden his knowledge, and the fact of his presence on that spot.... With a rush came realization of the strangeness of these facts, a bewilderment, a burning curiosity to know what was the meaning of the riddle--and a suspicion of Cantor which demanded investigation and verification. "Who is this man? What is he doing here? What is his real business? What does he want to conceal on that island?" These were questions which presented themselves and demanded an answer. CHAPTER XXI Time is an eel. No matter how you sand your fingers, it wriggles through and is gone. One sets an act for to-morrow, especially if one be laboring as Potter Waite was laboring in those feverish days, and awakes suddenly to find it is next week or next month--and nothing had been done. When every hour of the day is carrying a double freight of necessary things to be done, the urgent thing that is capable of being pushed ahead finds itself moving hopelessly into the future. When Potter drove to his office from the Bloomfield Hills club he was a man of single purpose, and that purpose was to pry into the affairs of Cantor until they lay upheaved for any man to view. He suspected Cantor, he knew not of what, but of something sinister. It sufficed, in such times, that the man had something to conceal; that the truth of him was not held up to public view.... And Potter hated him.