Louis's want of truthfulness had caused this uncertainty, as he had left no intimation of the path he purposed taking when he quitted his mother's house: he had merely said he was going with Hector in search of the cattle, giving no hint of his intention of asking Catharine to accompany them: he had but told his sick sister, that he would bring home strawberries and flowers, and that he would soon return.

Alas, poor thoughtless Louis, how little did you think of the web of woe you were then weaving for yourself, and all those to whom you and your giddy companions were so dear! Children, think twice, ere ye deceive once! Catharine's absence would have been quite unaccountable but for the testimony of Duncan and Kenneth, who had received her sisterly caresses before she joined Hector at the barn; and much her mother marvelled what could have induced her good dutiful Catharine to have left her work and forsaken her household duties to go rambling away with the boys, for she never left the house when her mother was absent from, it, without her express permission, and now she was gone--lost to them, perhaps for ever.

There stood the wheel she had been turning, there hung the untwisted hanks of yarn, her morning task,--and there they remained week after week and month after month, untouched, a melancholy memorial to the hearts of the bereaved parents of their beloved.
It were indeed a fruitless task to follow the agonized fathers in their vain search for their children, or to paint the bitter anguish that filled their hearts as day passed after day, and still no tidings of the lost ones.

As hope faded, a deep and settled gloom stole over the sorrowing parents, and reigned throughout the once cheerful and gladsome homes.

At the end of a week the only idea that remained was, that one of these three casualties had befallen the lost children:--death, a lingering death by famine; death, cruel and horrible, by wolves or bears; or yet more terrible, with tortures by the hands of the dreaded Indians, who occasionally held their councils and hunting parties on the hills about the Rice Lake, which was known only by the elder Perron as the scene of many bloody encounters between the rival tribes of the Mohawks and Chippewas: its localities were scarcely ever visited by our settlers, lest haply they should fall into the hands of the bloody Mohawks, whose merciless dispositions made them in those days a by-word even to the less cruel Chippewas and other Indian nations.
It was not in the direction of the Rice Lake that Maxwell and his brother-in-law sought their lost children; and even if they had done so, among the deep glens and hill passes of what is now commonly called the Plains, they would have stood little chance of discovering the poor wanderers.