“Emily passed on with faltering steps and, having paused a moment at the door before she attempted to open it, she then hastily entered the chamber and went towards the picture, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room.  She paused again and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil, but instantly let it fall—­perceiving that, what it had concealed was no picture and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor.”

In time Emily recovers, but the horror of the Black Veil preys on her mind until, near the close of the third volume, Mrs. Radcliffe mercifully consents to tell us not only what Emily thought that she beheld, but what was actually there.

“There appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within the recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave.  What added to the horror of the spectacle was that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands...  Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax...  A member of the house of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image made to resemble a human body in the state to which it is reduced after death ... he had made it a condition in his will that his descendants should preserve the image.”

Mrs. Radcliffe, realising that the secret she had so jealously guarded is of rather an amazing character, asserts that it is “not without example in the records of the fierce severity which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind.”  But the explanation falls so ludicrously short of our expectations and is so improbable a possibility, that Mrs. Radcliffe would have been wise not to defraud Catherine Morland and other readers of the pleasure of guessing aright.  Few enjoy being baffled and thwarted in so unexpected a fashion.  The skeleton of Signora Laurentina was the least that could be expected as a reward for suspense so patiently endured.  But long ere this disclosure, we have learnt by bitter experience to distrust Mrs. Radcliffe’s secrets and to look for ultimate disillusionment.  The uncanny voice that ominously echoes Montoni’s words is not the cry of a bodiless visitant striving to awaken “that blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom,” but belongs to an ordinary human being, the prisoner Du Pont, who has discovered one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s innumerable concealed passages.  The bed with the black velvet pall in the haunted chamber contains, not the frightful apparition that flashed upon the inward eye of Emily and of Annette, but a stalwart pirate who shrinks from