He fancied that the peculiar faint odour of her heavy cloth cloak, just damped by the few drops of rain that had reached it, still hung in the air.

With the slightest effort of memory, her voice came back to his ears, now gentle, now gravely reproachful, but at last ringing like steel on steel in her generous anger.

She had been present, in that room, in his power, during more than twenty minutes, and now she was gone and would never come again.
He had done the most rash, inconsequent, and uselessly bad deed that had ever suggested itself to his imagination, and now that all was over he wondered how he could have been at once so foolish, so brutal, and so daring.

Perhaps five years of slavery in Africa had unsettled his mind; he had heard of several similar cases and his own might be another; he had read of officers who had lost all sense of responsibility after months of fighting in the tropics, perhaps from having borne responsibility too long and unshared, who had come back, after doing brave and honourable work, to find themselves morally crippled for civilised life, and no longer able to distinguish right from wrong or truth from falsehood.
It had all happened quickly but illogically, as events follow each other in dreams, from the moment when he had gone to the Convent hospital with Monsignor Saracinesca till the brougham drove away in the dark, taking Angela back.

He understood for the first time how men whom every one supposed to be of average uprightness could commit atrocious crimes; he shuddered to think what must have happened if a mere chance had not changed his mood, making him ask Angela's forgiveness and prompting him to let her go.