Louis made no reply; his sad and subdued air failed not to attract the
attention of his cousins. "Why, Louis, how is this? you are not used to be
cast down by difficulties," said Hector, as he marked something like tears
glistening in the dark eyes of his cousin.

Louis's heart was full, he did not reply, but cast a troubled glance upon
the weary Catharine, who leaned heavily against the tree beneath which she
sat.

"It is not," resumed Hector, "that I mind passing a summer's night under
such a sky as this, and with such a dry grassy bed below me; but I do not
think it is good for Catharine to sleep on the bare ground in the night
dews,--and then they will be so anxious at home about our absence."

Louis burst into tears, and sobbed out,--"And it is all my doing that
she came out with us; I deceived her, and my aunt will be angry and much
alarmed, for she did not know of her going at all. Dear Catharine, good
cousin Hector, pray forgive me!" But Catharine was weeping too much to
reply to his passionate entreaties, and Hector, who never swerved from the
truth, for which he had almost a stern reverence, hardly repressed his
indignation at what appeared to him a most culpable act of deceit on the
part of Louis.

The sight of her cousin's grief and self-abasement touched the tender
heart of Catharine, for she was kind and dove-like in her disposition,
and loved Louis, with all his faults. Had it not been for the painful
consciousness of the grief their unusual absence would occasion at home,
Catharine would have thought nothing of their present adventure; but she
could not endure the idea of her high-principled father taxing her with
deceiving her kind indulgent mother and him: it was this humiliating