La Motte to commence highwayman. His very first
victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious retreats to a
tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in short, been contemplating his
booty, jewels which he could not convert into ready money. Consequently,
when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, La Motte had every reason for
alarm, and only pacified the vindictive aristocrat by yielding to his
cruel schemes against the virtue of Adeline.

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