Potter went home, but not to bed. He had arrived at a moment where attention must be focused upon Cantor. Fact after fact had strayed into his storehouse, to be put on a shelf and to be allowed to collect the dust of disuse. Now he dusted them off and placed them on the counter. He had not fancied they would stretch out into such an arresting array. To his mind they were conclusive, yet among them all was not a scrap of the commodity known to courts of the law as evidence. All was suspicion, conjecture--and yet every item was a fact. Potter knew it to be a fact. First were the facts of that mysterious island in Muscamoot Bay--Cantor's presence there, the strange conveyance of his aeroplane from the island to the distant mainland. Second were Cantor's relations with Hildegarde von Essen. These became impressive when set with other facts. Third, the theft of Matthews's 'plane. Then, in their order, Cantor's unguarded talk of that evening, the possibility of his oneness with Lieutenant Adolf von Arnheim. And lastly, and very significantly, the fact that Hildegarde von Essen had been the one to warn Potter of the attack upon his hangar--that and her manner at the time, her secretiveness, her reluctance to disclose the source of her information. When Potter put together this last point with the fact of the relations he believed to exist between Hildegarde and Cantor, he _knew_ it was Cantor Hildegarde had shielded by her refusal to answer. She had protected her lover--the man who had compelled her to utter that word "defiled." How had Hildegarde come by her knowledge? was a question he asked himself, and, answering it, stabbed himself with the hot iron of anguish. Cantor was not the man to babble. He was not the man to boast loosely to any living creature, most of all a woman. But Cantor had confided in her; that was patent.... But one conclusion was open to Potter, and that was based on the fact, often repeated in literature and in life, that there is one moment when a man will tell a woman anything.... Hildegarde, slender, boyish, brightly flaming Hildegarde, had known that moment. In every man lies sleeping a potential killer of his fellow-man. Your sedate merchant, your clumsy farm laborer, your esthete, your saintly man of God, your mincing dilettante, all have quiescent within them a fury, a madness, a savagery which is capable of placing in their hands the dripping knife of the murderer.... It quickened and flamed in Potter Waite, and he hungered, not for honest combat with an enemy, but to feel that enemy helpless under his hand, that enemy's throat twisted and crushed beneath his fingers.... For he suffered from the deadliest wrong of which a universe potent of frightful sins is capable--the pure thing he loved with purity had been defiled.