Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/336

 and the others still preserved a kind of predilection for the farm, paying back to the son the hospitality they had enjoyed from the father. Then again he heard about his son that he was with a certain gamekeeper, and that he was happy in the woods and ravines, and when the gamekeeper sent word that Frank behaved well with him, Frank was suffered to remain. Then a forester saw Frank at the gamekeeper’s house, and hearing that he was a son from Loyka’s estate, said: “So you must come and stay with me as well,” and then Frank advanced just like a vagabond, having been a vagabond at the gamekeeper’s, in course of time he became a vagabond at the forester’s.

And here in these woods it seemed as though he had found once more all that he missed at home. When he found himself in some rocky haunt overshadowed by pine trees, all the fairy stories stood before him, just as if he were seated at home in one of those chambers by the coach house, until he even felt himself involved in horror, until even a panic seized him in that chilly dusk of the woodland, just as at home when at even they narrated about white women, about black hounds, and about accursed personages.

When a panic seized him, he laid foot to shoulder, sped out of the wood across the fields and to the cemetery, shouted to Staza, and then led her away that she might hear with him what he had heard