world say if it knew that the judge and
the man accused of murder were father and son? How the tongues of the
gossips would wag! What headlines there would be in the newspapers!
What a sensation it would create throughout the country!

He laughed aloud, a half-mad laugh. His brain reeled at what his
mother had told him. Even yet he did not realise fully the issues of
her momentous communication. That would come later! The thing which
appealed to him now was that he had found his father, and his father
was the man who was sitting in judgment on him!

Never did he hate him as he did at that moment. This man had deceived
his mother, blackened her life, allowed her to remain in loneliness,
misery and disgrace. Because of him a shadow had rested upon his own
life, a shadow which nothing had been able to lift. Yes, he hated him.
He thought of the cross-examination that day. This man at the
beginning of the trial had pretended to act as his friend, had advised
him to accept counsel, had told him that he might defend himself and
ask questions. And, utilising the power which he possessed as a judge,
had himself asked the witnesses questions, on the pretence that he was
trying to do the prisoner justice!

And what questions! To his excited and poisoned mind he had simply
supplied the deficiencies of the counsel for the prosecution. Every
word he had uttered was only meant as another nail in his scaffold. He
was glad he had said what he had said now. He had made both jury and
court feel that the judge was unjust because of his prejudice against
him. But that was nothing to what he could do, nothing to what he
would do. Why, supposing on the next day--yes, and he could do it,
too--supposing on the next day of the trial he, the prisoner, were to
proclaim before the court, before the twelve jurymen, before the eager
counsel, before the gaping, excited crowd, that this Judge Bolitho,
this man who assumed an immaculate air, was one of the most damnable
villains that ever crawled upon the earth, that this man, who looked so
virtuous and spoke of the majesty of justice, had foully deceived a
poor, ignorant, innocent girl, dragged her name in the mire, left her
to die, as far as he was concerned, in disgrace! He, the judge, had
done this, and all the world should know it. Yes, all the world. This
man should be pilloried before all England, and every healthy,
clean-minded man in the nation would shudder at his name.