A few minutes before sunrise, there came a change. He had lain so quiet for many hours that they thought he slept, but suddenly Rachel perceived that his eyes were wide open and that he was listening intently to the wind whistling in the space between the houses. Its rushing passage produced a last flicker in the fantastic mind. "The cars! We're whirlin'--" His mouth opened in astonishment. "Stop, look, listen!" he muttered faintly, turning his eyes to hers. Then the air ceased to undulate, grew quiet, above his still and amazed face. The first golden beams of the sun peeped in at the windows as old David's soul, in the majesty of its innocence, passed from earth. CHAPTER VIII A WOMAN'S CAPRICE--A FATHER'S REPENTANCE--A LOVER'S SELF-CONQUEST--A GIRL'S PITY When Simon Hart agreed to his cousin's plan, and Rachel, despite her protests, was conveyed from the hospital to Julia Burgdorf's house, he did not experience the unpleasantness he had anticipated. The personality of his cousin was not agreeable to him. He had never liked her; partly, because he was jealous of a social prestige which he himself had never been able to attain; partly, because he disapproved of her dropping her family name, for Julia, when a child, had adopted the cognomen of a distant relative from whom she had inherited a fortune. But the fundamental reason for his disapprobation lay deeper, concealed in the current of their common blood. Though diametrically opposed to Julia in character, Simon was able to comprehend in her traits which he especially disliked. They were like two compounds containing different proportions of the same ingredient. In Simon the strain of their common ancestry had been fused with a widely alien current. From his mother, a pale-featured, down-looking woman, much given to keeping her own counsel, he had inherited his air of secrecy, his pallor, as well as his capacity for profound and delicate feeling. But in Julia the original current of the Hart blood retained all its primitive strength; plainly, she was one whose forefathers had loved "wine and women and wild boars," and in every trait she was more closely related to old Nicholas than was Simon. Though Nicholas now quaveringly sought the beauties of a butterfly's wing, time was when he had pursued woman's glances with the same ardour; in fact, he had been in his day a cup of lusty life. It was the very irony of fate that this legacy of the Hart spirit had passed his own son and descended in all its troubled richness on his sister's child. The only difference between uncle and niece was that which is accounted for by sex. Julia, being no fool, accepted the restraints that hamper the existence of a conventional woman. Like Nicholas she had slight sympathy with Simon. The antagonism of the cousins was mutual. In speaking of Julia, Simon habitually employed an ironical tone; while Julia treated Simon with condescension, and, behind his back, with ridicule.