Was it not her natural, inevitable portion?
"I will tell Aldous everything--_everything_," she said to herself for the hundredth time, as the light penetrated.

"Was _that_ only seven striking--_seven_--impossible!" She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the hours that must pass before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.
Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.
"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--her passion to get away from herself.

"Is he gone?
This is the hour when old people die--the dawn.

I will go and see--go at once." She sprang up.

To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance, of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself, if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work.