her son should believe the
step-brother whom he had looked up to with such honest devotion, and the
girl he had loved so truly, domestic conspirators who had been deceiving
him all the time?

Poor Ralph! these doubts fell with cruel force on his generous nature.
His confidence was all swept away--the best jewel of his life had fallen
off. To him, love had no longer the holiness of truth. Household
trust--faith in human goodness--all was disturbed. He was wild with
indignation, torn with a thousand conflicting feelings; sometimes
heart-broken with grief--again, reckless and defiant; then a spirit of
bitter retaliation seized upon him. What was Lina, with her gentle
affections and pretty reserves, that he should waste a life in regrets
for her, while another, ardent, impassioned, and loving him madly, was
pining to death for the affection he had thrown away so lavishly for
nothing? What, after all, was there to charm more in one woman than
another? Lina was false; why should he remain faithful?

These were wild, rash thoughts; but Ralph was young, tortured in his
first love, and tempted by an artful, impassioned woman, whose perverse
will carried the strength of fate with it.

Still, it was only at times that his heart rose hotly against its old
nature. There was more of scorn and rage, mingled with the certainty
that Agnes Barker loved him, than of real passion, but it assuaged the
humiliation of Lina's falsehood, and the consciousness of her attachment
diverted the grief that would otherwise have consumed him. Though
maddened by all these conflicting passions, the young man had sought
desperately after the lost girl from the moment her absence was
discovered on the morning after the storm, but she seemed to have
disappeared like a shadow from the earth; for from the hour when she
left Ben Benson's boat-house, not a trace of her movements could be
found.

For the third time, Ralph went down to the boat-house to question the
old sailor, whom he found housed up, as he called it, in a fit of sullen
grief, which it required some tact to break in upon.

Ben was sitting in his domicile before a rousing fire, which he now and
then stooped to feed with hickory logs, till the whole room was filled
with a warm glow of light. So many additions and ornaments had been
added to the boat-house, that it took the appearance of a ship's cabin
more than anything else. The fire revealed a trap-door in the centre of
the room, which an