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[Nestler L. <ae...@wa...>]

Now 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