He found it harder to reconcile that with his past and himself than anything else.

So bewildered was he, drinking tea and eating cake, with the spread of Miss Camilla's lilac flounces brushing his knee, and her soft voice now and then in his ear, that he strove to remember how he happened to be there at all, and that shock of strangeness which obliterates the past wellnigh paralyzed his memory.
Yet it had been simple enough, as paths to strange conclusions always are.

He had returned home from Squire Eben's that morning, changed his clothes, and resumed his work in the garden.
Elmira had questioned him, but he gave her no information.

He had an instinct, which had been born in him, of secrecy towards womankind.
Nobody had ever told him that women were not trustworthy with respect to confidences; he had never found it so from observation; he simply agreed within himself that he had better not confide any but fully matured plans, and no plans which should be kept secret, to a woman.
He had, however, besides this caution, a generous resolution not to worry Elmira or his mother about it until he knew.

"Wait till I find out; I don't know myself," he told Elmira.
"Don't you know where you've been?
You can tell us that," she persisted, in her sweet, querulous treble.