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.