velations!" "Judge Bolitho confesses that he is the
prisoner's father!" "Tremendous excitement in court! Many women
fainted!" and so on and so on. Factories became emptied as if by
magic. At every corner crowds gathered. Business was at a standstill.
The members of the Manchester Exchange had forgotten to think of the
rise or fall of cotton. Everything was swallowed up in the news of the
day.

Every telegraph office, too, was filled with eager people, and the
means of communication from one part of the country to another was
taxed to its utmost. Some few months before the Prime Minister of the
country had come to Manchester to speak on a question which was
exciting not only England but the whole Empire, but even then the
telegraph wires had never been so congested with news as on that
morning. In a little over an hour after the judge had left the court
the London papers were full of it. Stirring headlines were on the
placards of all the evening papers, and people bought them with almost
the same avidity as they had bought them in Manchester. In a sense
there seemed no reason why so much interest should have been aroused,
but in another there was. Such a confession on the part of the judge
was almost unprecedented, and as both Judge Bolitho and Paul Stepaside
were so largely in the public eye, their sayings and doings seemed of
the utmost importance. There was something romantic in it, too. A
father sitting in judgment upon his own son, and not knowing until a
few hours before that he was his son!

But Judge Bolitho was unconscious of all this. He never thought of it.
When he left the court that morning he retired for a few minutes into
the judge's room; but he could not remain there--he was too excited,
too overwhelmed. He must do something. For now that he had made his
confession the whole case appeared to him in a different way from what
it had appeared to the public. They, in their wonder at the revelation
of the facts which Judge Bolitho had made known, had almost ceased to
think of the possible doom of the prisoner. But that became of supreme
importance to him. In a way which no man can explain, his heart had
gone out to his son. Nature had asserted itself. Years had become as
nothing, past events seemed to lose their force, in the thought that
Paul Stepaside was his son; and he feared for his future, he was in
danger of his life. When the new judge was appointed, whoever it might
be, he kn