I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

"Sometimes to be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself."

I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.