"Silence!" exclaimed the old man, in a terrible voice. His hand, trembling with passion, had struck against the strong-box, and at its touch his wrath broke out in flame. "That man is dead to you henceforth! You gave your promise without conditions. Moreover, his fate is in the hands of the law, and not in mine." CHAPTER XXV. AN UNEXPECTED GUEST. 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.