Six days had come and gone since her lover’s departure from Gethin, but no tidings of him had reached Harry’s ears.  Solomon had returned on the second day, and been closeted with her father for some hours, doubtless in consultation about Richard; but not a word had been spoken of him, in her presence, by either.  She dared not mention him to her father, and still less could she apply for information to his rival, her now affianced bridegroom.  How much, or how little, her father had disclosed concerning him to Sol she did not know; but the latter had evidently closed with the terms which she had in her late strait accepted on her own part.  The bans had been put up in the church upon the hill, and in a month she would be this man’s wife.  She had been congratulated upon the coming event by all the neighbors.  Some had slyly hinted—­little guessing the pain they gave to that sore heart—­at her late “goings-on” with that young gentleman-painter; they had almost suspected at one time that he would have supplanted her old flame; but they were glad to see matters as they were.  Solomon was a steady, sagacious man, as every body knew, and would get on in the world; and what he gained he would not waste in foolish ways.  Such an old friend of her father’s, too.  Nothing could be more fitting and satisfactory in all respects.  Solomon, notoriously a laggard in love, was likened to the tortoise, who had won the race against the hare.

To have to listen to all this well-meant twaddle was misery indeed.  Perhaps, upon the whole, good honest dullness does unknowingly inflict more grievous wounds than the barbed satiric tongue.

To think, to picture to herself the condition of her lover—­deplorable, she was convinced, from the grim satisfaction upon Solomon’s face when he first came back—­was torture.  She could not read, for her mind fled from the page, like breath from a mirror; there was nothing for it but occupation.  She busied herself as she had never done before with the affairs of the house, which afforded some excuse for escaping from Sol’s attentions, naturally grown somewhat pressing, now that his wedded happiness was drawing so near.  The Gethin Castle was not, however, very full of guests.  It had been wet for a few days, and rain spoils the harvest of the inn-keeper even more than that of the farmer.  One night, when it was pouring heavily, and such a windfall as a new tourist was not to have been expected by the most sanguine Boniface, a lady arrived, alone, and took up her quarters in the very room that Richard had vacated.  Trevethick himself was at the door when she had driven up and asked with some apparent anxiety whether she could be accommodated.  She was wrapped up, and thickly veiled, but he had observed to his daughter what a well-spoken woman she was, and an uncommon fine one too, though her hair was gray.  She had inquired whether there were any letters waiting for her, addressed to Mrs. Gilbert; but there was no letter.