And he did go, but not alone. As soon as Claud became fully satisfied that his father’s purpose was not to be shaken, he began earnestly to debate in mind the question whether he himself should not, as a filial duty, become a participant in the expedition, with the view of making his presence instrumental in averting the apprehended danger. And, although he perceived that his mother’s distress, all troubled and doubtful as she was in deciding between her conflicting duties of affection, would be enhanced by the step; and, although his mind had been still more staggered by a brief confidential note from Avis Gurley, advising him, if not too late, to find means to break up the project of the expedition entirely, yet he finally made up his mind in the affirmative. And, accordingly, on the morning of the appointed day, both father and son, after a leave-taking with the despondent wife and mother, more ominously sad and mournful than had ever before marked their family trials, set forth again for the wild wastes of the lakes, with their now doubly questionable companion. CHAPTER XVIII. “But there was weeping far away; And gentle eyes, for him, With watching many an anxious day, Were sorrowful and dim.” BRYANT’S MURDERED TRAVELLER. It was the second week in May; and spring, delightful spring, sweet herald of happiness to all the living creatures that have undergone the almost literal imprisonment of one of the long and dreary winters of our hyperborean clime, was beginning to sprinkle the green glories of approaching summer over the reänimated wilderness. In the physical world, all seemed light and laughing around: ----“the green soil with joyous living things Swarm’d, the wide air was full of joyous wings.” The sun, no longer feebly struggling through the dark, obstructed medium of a northern winter’s atmosphere, was throwing abroad his clear, unstinted floods of living light, bathing with soft radiance the diversified face of the basking forest, and gleaming far and brightly over the soothed waters of the sleeping lake. The mild and genial zephyrs were discoursing the low, sweet, melancholy music of their æolian harps, among the gently-wavering tops of the whispering pines. The choral throng of feathered songsters were filling every grove, glade, or glen, of field and forest, with the glad strains of their merry melodies. And all nature seemed crying aloud, in the fullness of her happiness, “The summer is coming; rejoice ye, rejoice!” So smiled every thing, animate and inanimate, in the visible physical world, as circumscribed to this secluded settlement, on the morning when opened the first scene in the closing act of our story’s changeful drama. But in the moral world, so far as the interests and feelings of most of our leading personages were involved, the skies were overcast with contrasted clouds of doubt and darkness.