He welcomed Austin with every show of manly tenderness, and sadness at heart.  Austin he had always associated with his Lucy in that Hesperian palace of the West.  Austin waited patiently.  Lady Judith’s old lord played on all the baths in Nassau without evoking the tune of health.  Whithersoever he listed she changed her abode.  So admirable a wife was to be pardoned for espousing an old man.  She was an enthusiast even in her connubial duties.  She had the brows of an enthusiast.  With occasion she might have been a Charlotte Corday.  So let her also be shielded from the ban of ridicule.  Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense of ninnies.  She was truly a high-minded person, of that order who always do what they see to be right, and always have confidence in their optics.  She was not unworthy of a young man’s admiration, if she was unfit to be his guide.  She resumed her ancient intimacy with Austin easily, while she preserved her new footing with Richard.  She and Austin were not unlike, only Austin never dreamed, and had not married an old lord.

The three were walking on the bridge at Limburg on the Lahn, where the shadow of a stone bishop is thrown by the moonlight on the water brawling over slabs of slate.  A woman passed them bearing in her arms a baby, whose mighty size drew their attention.

“What a wopper!” Richard laughed.

“Well, that is a fine fellow,” said Austin, “but I don’t think he’s much bigger than your boy.”

“He’ll do for a nineteenth-century Arminius,” Richard was saying.  Then he looked at Austin.

“What was that you said?” Lady Judith asked of Austin.

“What have I said that deserves to be repeated?” Austin counterqueried quite innocently.

“Richard has a son?”

“You didn’t know it?”

“His modesty goes very far,” said Lady Judith, sweeping the shadow of a curtsey to Richard’s paternity.

Richard’s heart throbbed with violence.  He looked again in Austin’s face.  Austin took it so much as a matter of course that he said nothing more on the subject.

“Well!” murmured Lady Judith.

When the two men were alone, Richard said in a quick voice:  “Austin! you were in earnest?”

“You didn’t know it, Richard?”

“No.”

“Why, they all wrote to you.  Lucy wrote to you:  your father, your aunt.  I believe Adrian wrote too.”

“I tore up their letters,” said Richard.

“He’s a noble fellow, I can tell you.  You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.  He’ll soon be coming to ask about you.  I made sure you knew.”

“No, I never knew.”  Richard walked away, and then said:  “What is he like?”

“Well, he really is like you, but he has his mother’s eyes.”

“And she’s—­”

“Yes.  I think the child has kept her well.”

“They’re both at Raynham?”

“Both.”

Hence fantastic vapours!  What are ye to this!  Where are the dreams of the hero when he learns he has a child?  Nature is taking him to her bosom.  She will speak presently.  Every domesticated boor in these hills can boast the same, yet marvels the hero at none of his visioned prodigies as he does when he comes to hear of this most common performance.  A father?  Richard fixed his eyes as if he were trying to make out the lineaments of his child.