as he once remarks, “in all respects strictly Gothic,” but containing a trap-door and a human skeleton in a chest, we willingly take up our abode there and wait patiently to see what will happen.  Our interest is inclined to flag when life at the abbey seems uneventful, but we are ere long rewarded by a visit from a stranger, whose approach flings La Motte into so violent a state of alarm that he vanishes with remarkable abruptness beneath a trapdoor.  It proves, however, that the intruder is merely La Motte’s son, and the timid marquis is able to emerge.  Meanwhile, La Motte’s wife, suspicious of her husband’s morose habits and his secret visits to a Gothic sepulchre, becomes jealous of Adeline, the girl they have befriended.  It later transpires that La Motte has turned highwayman and stores his booty in this secluded spot.  The visits are so closely shrouded in obscurity, and we have so exhausted our imagination in picturing dark possibilities, that the simple solution falls disappointingly short of our expectations.  The next thrill is produced by the arrival of two strangers, the wicked marquis and the noble hero, without whom the tale of characters in a novel of terror would scarcely be complete.  The emotion La Motte betrays at the sight of the marquis is due, we are told eventually, to the fact that Montalt was the victim of his first robbery.  Adeline, meanwhile, in a dream sees a beckoning figure in a dark cloak, a dying man imprisoned in a darkened chamber, a coffin and a bleeding corpse, and hears a voice from the coffin.  The disjointed episodes and bewildering incoherence of a nightmare are suggested with admirable skill, and effectually prepare our minds for Adeline’s discoveries a few nights later.  Passing through a door, concealed by the arras of her bedroom, into a chamber like that she had seen in her sleep, she stumbles over a rusty dagger and finds a roll of mouldering manuscripts.  This incident is robbed of its effect for readers of Northanger Abbey by insistent reminiscences of Catherine Morland’s discovery of the washing bills.  But Adeline, by the uncertain light of a candle, reads, with the utmost horror and consternation, the harrowing life-story of her father, who has been foully done to death by his brother, already known to us as the unprincipled Marquis Montalt.  La Motte weakly aids and abets Montalt’s designs against Adeline, and she is soon compelled to take refuge in flight.  She is captured and borne away to an elegant villa, whence she escapes, only to be overtaken again.  Finally, Theodore arrives, as heroes will, in the nick of time, and wounds his rival.  Adeline finds a peaceful home in the chateau of M. La Luc, who proves to be Theodore’s father.  Here the reader awaits impatiently the final solution of the plot.  Once we have been inmates of a Gothic abbey, life in a Swiss chateau, however idyllic, is apt to seem monotonous.  In time Mrs. Radcliffe administers justice.  The marquis takes poison; La Motte is banished but reforms; and Adeline, after dutifully burying her father’s skeleton in the family vault, becomes mistress of the abbey, but prefers to reside in a chalet on the banks of Lake Geneva.