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.

Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied into the air, and walked on and on.  “A father!” he kept repeating to himself:  “a child!” And though he knew it not, he was striking the keynotes of Nature.  But he did know of a singular harmony that suddenly burst over his whole being.

The moon was surpassingly bright:  the summer air heavy and still.  He left the high road and pierced into the forest.  His walk was rapid:  the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks; the dead leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet.  Something of a religious joy—­a strange sacred pleasure—­was in him.  By degrees it wore; he remembered himself:  and now he was possessed