Darkness was fast drawing its impenetrable veil around them; a few stars were stealing out, and gleaming down as if with pitying glance upon the young wanderers; but they could not light up their pathway, or point their homeward track.

The only sound, save the lulling murmur of the rippling stream below, was the plaintive note of the whip-poor-will, from a gnarled oak that grew near them, and the harsh grating scream of the night hawk, darting about in the higher regions of the air, pursuing its noisy congeners, or swooping down with that peculiar hollow rushing sound, as of a person blowing into some empty vessel, when it seizes with wide-extended bill its insect prey.
Hector was the first to break the silence.

"Cousin Louis, we were wrong in following the course of the stream; I fear we shall never find our way back to-night." 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.