“I thought so.  We’ll have company.”

“Why do you choose the Long Island road?” asked Lorelei.

“It’s pleasant,” responded Merkle.  “I ride nearly every night, and I like the country.  You see, I can’t sleep unless I’m in motion.  I get most of my rest in a car; there’s something about the movement that soothes me.”

“How funny!”

“Peculiar, perhaps, but scarcely humorous.  I’d be dead or insane without an automobile.  You see, I’m nothing but a rack of bones strung together with quivering nerves—­always been so, and I’m getting worse.  I keep four French cars in my garage, all specially built as to spring-suspension and upholstery, and I spend nearly every night in one or the other of them.  It’s seldom I do less than a hundred miles between midnight and morning; sometimes, when I’m bad, I do twice that.  So long as I’m moving fast I manage to snatch a miserable sort of repose, but the instant we go slow I wake up.  It’s the sensation of flight, the music of a swift-running motor, the wind blowing in my face, that lulls me; but it’s getting harder all the time.  I used to sleep at twenty miles an hour; now I can’t relax under thirty.  Forty is fine—­sixty means dreamless peace.”

“It does, indeed, if one happens to have a blowout,” laughed the girl.

“I have trouble keeping chauffeurs.  The darkness breaks their nerve, and they play out in two or three months.  I’ve known them to crack under the strain in a week, and yet all the time I want to go faster—­faster.  Some night, when a bolt breaks, or my driver’s eye and hand fail to co-ordinate, it will all end, I suppose, in a twinkling, and—­I’ll get a good rest at last.  Meanwhile I thank Heaven and Mr. Vanderbilt for the Motor Parkway.”

The car had threaded the after-theater congestion of traffic with a swiftness that testified to the practised hand on the wheel, and was now darting through unfrequented side-streets where the asphalt lay in the shadows like dark pools.  Up the approach to the Queensborough Bridge it swept, and took the long incline like a soaring bird.  Overhead, the massive towers pierced the night sky; the steel-ribbed skeleton-tunnel rushed past the riders; far beneath, the river itself lay like a sheet of metal, glittering here and there with the yellow lights of ships.  Blackwell’s Island slipped under them, an inky bottomless pit of despair, out of which points of fire gleamed upward—­like faint, steady-burning sparks of hope in the hearts of miserable men.  The breath of the overheated city changed as by magic, and the thin-faced sufferer at Lorelei’s side drank it in eagerly.  Even in the dim flash of the passing illuminations she noted how tired and worn he was, and a sudden pity smote her.

“Won’t you pretend I’m not here, and drive just as you always do?  I won’t mind,” she said.

“My dear, it’s late.  You’ll need to get home.”

“No, no.”

“Really?” His eagerness was genuine.  “Won’t your people worry?”