For more than an hour Judge Bolitho tramped the streets of Manchester, unheeding whither he went and as little knowing. He was vainly trying to understand what he had heard, trying to bring some order out of the chaos of his thoughts and feelings. Everything was confused, bewildering. He was like a man in a dream. The experiences through which he had passed refused to shape themselves definitely. A mist hung before the eyes of his mind, and yet he knew it was no dream. It was all real, terribly real, and presently everything would stand out before him with a ghastly clearness. Even now one thing was plain enough, one fact impressed itself upon the tablets of his brain--Paul Stepaside was his son. The interview he had had with the woman he deceived was in the background; even although past memories had been roused and the deeds of his youth had been brought before him with awful clearness, they were as nothing compared with this fact of facts. He did not know he had a son; he never dreamt of such a thing. During the long years which had elapsed since he parted with Jean at the lonely inn near the Scottish border he had often wondered what had become of her, wondered, too, whether those past days would ever be resurrected; but the thought that he had a son had never occurred to him. And now the knowledge overwhelmed everything else. Little by little things shaped themselves in his mind. He saw them as others would see them. The events of the past few years, since he had first met Paul, began to stand out with clearness. He remembered his own impressions on the day when Paul was first brought before him, accused of rioting and of inciting others to deeds of violence. He remembered, too, that he had a kind of pleasure in obtaining a hard sentence for him. He recalled the fact that both Mr. Wilson and his son Ned had spoken of him as an evil-dispositioned fellow, who deserved the utmost penalty of the law, and he had fallen in with their ideas, and had taken a kind of grim pleasure in doing so. It was a strange business altogether. For the moment he seemed to be a kind of third party considering a curious phenomenon. He seemed to have no direct connection with it at all. But as he remembered after events, when he called to mind the fact that he fought Paul at the election and failed to condemn those who made use of slanderous gossip, then he was more than a spectator. He realised all too vividly against whom he had been fighting. And it had come to this: this man whom he had always disliked, and against whom there seemed to be always a feeling of antagonism, was revealed to him as his own son! His treatment of Jean, bad though it was, took a second place; indeed, at that time he troubled very little about it. He felt as though he could deal with it later on. Everything was centred upon the situation, which was summed up in a few words: He had a son, his son was accused of murder, and he was the judge!