And yet he did not seem a part of it.

It did not seem natural to him.

He was in an atmosphere of strangeness--that atmosphere which surrounds a man, as by a cloud, when some crisis comes upon him and his life seems to stand still, whirling upon its narrow base, while the world appears at an interminable distance, even as to a deaf man who sees yet cannot hear.
There came home to him at that moment with a force indescribable the shamelessness of the act he committed four years ago.

He had thought to come back to miserable humiliation.

For four years he had refused to do his duty as a man towards an innocent woman,--a woman, though in part a savage,--now transformed into a gentle, noble creature of delight and goodness.