he was constantly with them when he was not with his grandfather, and it did him no harm. He was rather pleased to think that the kalounkar, the musicians, 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 before alone. On the way he had already prepared her for what she was to expect, that, as he said, she might not be too much startled. And on the way through the fields they visited various hedgerows and their trysting-places, and here they had already lost half their fear and on their way through the wood there was no need to penetrate to its rocky haunts, not at all, they took the path by the outskirts of the wood, or perhaps amused themselves at the keeper’s house, and so lost the other half of their fears.
And this expedition into the wood was for Staza something unutterably charming and wonderful. From Bartos, the gravedigger, she heard how robbers fell upon him in the woods and how he defended himself. From Frank she heard how a panic seized a man when he retired to its rocky wilderness. And when she came thither with Frank, she saw trees like giants, she heard the murmur as of a mighty river, she felt the breath of flowers,
