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.
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