"'But we heard that he was out yesterday evening, in your new steam launch.'
"'Ah! that ... yes ... that is because his eyes are very painful. He can't bear the least light. So he gets no exercise and no change of air during the day.'
"'Well, in that case of course he couldn't expect to sleep!' And then Lady McIntyre had an inspiration. 'Doesn't it sound,' she appealed to Sir William, 'extremely like the kind of insomnia Lord Grantbury suffers from? I believe it's the very identical same. And Lord Grantbury has found a cure.'
"Great sensation on the part of the Pforzheims. Oh, would Lady McIntyre tell them.... They'd be eternally grateful if she would only get Lord Grantbury's prescription. But Lady McIntyre could produce it at once. She did produce it. And what did Julian think it was?"
Julian shook his head. He knew quite well now that Arthur was telling him this yarn in order to avoid reopening the subject of their disagreement—the only one in their lives. So he bore with hearing that Lord Grantbury's remedy for insomnia was a combination of motion and absence of daylight. Lord Grantbury had contended that light was a strong excitant. That the consciousness of being seen, of having to acknowledge recognition, or even of knowing your label was being clapped on your back—all that was disturbing in certain states of health. "'So he has himself driven out, they say, about eleven o'clock at night in a sixty-horsepower car, and goes whizzing along lonely roads where there's no fear of police traps, as hard as he can lick. When he comes back, he finds that all that ozone, and whatever it is, has quieted him. He sleeps like a top.' The sons were advised to put Father Pforzheim in a Rolls-Royce car and see what would happen. 'You haven't got a high power car? Till they can send for one,'—Lady McIntyre appealed to her husband—'don't you think, William, we might—?'
"But Carl, profuse in thanks, said that unfortunately his father had a nervous abhorrence of motor cars.
"'How very strange!' said Lady McIntyre.
"'No, it wasn't at all strange. My mother,'—Carl dropped his eyes and compressed his full lips—'our dear mother was killed in a motor accident.'
"'But our father,'—Ernst looked up as he brushed a white, triple-ringed hand across his eyes—'our father finds the water soothing. After all, Carl, swift motion on the water, why shouldn't that do as well as racing along a road?'
"'And darkness,' said Lady McIntyre.