Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/409

 pated themselves of their own accord, and he every day visibly convalesced. Once more he took his walk every evening to the chambers by the coach-house, and himself invited the inmates to converse and sing. “Be merry, lads, be merry,” he used to say.

And the old life began again at the Loykas’. That farm was now once more just as people had known it all their lives. Old Loyka so far convalesced that he threw off several years as though they had been a few heavy sheaves of corn; so that at last his friends ventured to tell him the whole truth, both about what had happened to Joseph, how he had sold out of the farm, and how the farm was bought for Frank, and how being still young, Frank begged that he, Loyka, should manage it for him. Ay, he so far convalesced that sometimes he would say, when he paid a visit to the chambers, “So, my lads, tell me the story of old Loyka when he was a wanderer in the world.”

“Ah! well, he was always very merry through it all,” so they began the story, and that was the only part where they did not tell him the whole truth, because they knew how greatly pleased he was that people should think he had been merry in the height of his misfortune.

They even told him that the illness of his wife was a mere pretext in order to coax him home again, and that it had succeeded.