Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial, who cast a lurid light on the character of the Marquis.  That villain, to be plain, had murdered his elder brother (the skeleton of the Abbey), and had been anxious to murder, it was added, his own natural daughter—­that is, Adeline!  His hired felons, however, placed her in a convent, and, later (rather than kill her, on which the Marquis insisted), simply thrust her into the hands of La Motte, who happened to pass by that way, as we saw in the opening of this romance.  Thus, in making love to Adeline, his daughter, the Marquis was, unconsciously, in an awkward position.  On further examination of evidence, however, things proved otherwise.  Adeline was not the natural daughter of the Marquis, but his niece, the legitimate daughter and heiress of his brother (the skeleton of the Abbey).  The MS. found by Adeline in the room of the rusty dagger added documentary evidence, for it was a narrative of the sufferings of her father (later the skeleton), written by him in the Abbey where he was imprisoned and stabbed, and where his bones were discovered by La Motte.  The hasty nocturnal flight of the Marquis from the Abbey is thus accounted for:  he had probably been the victim of a terrific hallucination representing his murdered brother; whether it was veridical or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe does not decide.  Rather than face the outraged justice of his country, the Marquis, after these revelations, took poison.  La Motte was banished; and Adeline, now mistress of the Abbey, removed the paternal skeleton to “the vault of his ancestors.”  Theodore and Adeline were united, and virtuously resided in a villa on the beautiful banks of the Lake of Geneva.

Such is the “Romance of the Forest,” a fiction in which character is subordinate to plot and incident.  There is an attempt at character drawing in La Motte, and in his wife; the hero and heroine are not distinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus.  But Mrs. Radcliffe does not aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for withholding what it was no part of her purpose to give.  “The Romance of the Forest” was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of modern English works of fiction.  “Every reader felt the force,” says Scott, “from the sage in his study, to the family group in middle life,” and nobody felt it more than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked how his time was employed, answered, “I read no Civil Law.”  He did read Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in “The Betrothed,” followed her example in the story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces the spectre attached to her ancient family.