D HER SON.

Ben Benson was never at home now; he went into the woods daily to snare
partridges, and set box-traps for rabbits, he said; and the inmates of
General Harrington's mansion were too sad and disheartened even for
smiles, at the idea of rabbits or partridges on New York island. Indeed,
the old fellow was too unhappy for his usual avocations. He would not
force himself to sit down at his nets, or touch the carpenter's tools
with which the boat-house was garnished. A strange belief haunted him
night and day, that Lina was somewhere in the wood, frozen to death, and
buried in the snow drifts--or worse, perhaps, had fallen through some
air-hole in the ice, and perished, calling in vain for help! The idea
that she had deliberately left her home, never found a place in his
belief for an instant.

Sometimes, in these wanderings, the old seaman saw Mabel Harrington
taking her own solitary way through the woods, but he had no wish to
address her; and, if she passed near him, would shrink behind some tree,
or pretend to be busy with his traps; for the mere sight of her face,
rigid and stern with a continued strain of thought, was enough to strike
him mute.

Thus it was that Mabel appeared to her family now. The strength and the
sunshine had departed from beneath that roof, and a dull, heavy
depression lay everywhere about her. General Harrington rather made the
old mansion a convenience than a home; half his time was spent at the
club-house. He had of late taken rooms at one of those aristocratic
up-town hotels, so foreign in all their appointments, that they might as
well be in the Boulevards of Paris as in New York, and often remained in
them all night; thus, without any apparent abandonment of his wife, he
in reality made the separation between them more complete than it had
yet been.

Did Mabel never inquire of herself the reason of all this? Alas! it is
difficult to say what anxiety or idea fixed itself uppermost in that
disturbed mind. The period was one of continued and heavy depression
with her. She had ceased to struggle with her own heart, or with the
dead, heavy weight of misery that settled each hour colder and more
drearily about her life. She took no interest in the household, but left
everything to the management of Agnes Barker. The very presence of the
young woman was oppressive to her, yet so drearily had her high spirit
yielded itself to the one numbing thought of James Harrington's absence,
tha