k chest and
the cabinet are there in startling fulfilment of his prophecies,
and when, just as with beating heart Catherine is about to
decipher the roll of paper she has discovered in the cabinet
drawer, she accidentally extinguishes her candle:

"A lamp could not have expired with more awful
effect... Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled
the room. A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden
fury, added fresh horror to the moment... Human nature
could support no more ... groping her way to the bed
she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of
agony by creeping far beneath the clothes... The storm
still raged... Hour after hour passed away, and the
wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the
clocks in the house before the tempest subsided, and
she, unknowingly, fell fast asleep. She was awakened
the next morning at eight o'clock by the housemaid's
opening her window-shutter. She flew to the mysterious
manuscript, If the evidence of sight might be trusted
she held a washing bill in her hands ... she felt
humbled to the dust."

Even this bitter humiliation does not sweep away the cobwebs of
romance from Catherine's imaginative mind, but the dark
suspicions she harbours about General Tilney are not altogether
inexplicable. He is so much less natural and so much more stagey
than the other characters that he might reasonably be expected to
dabble in the sinister. This time Catherine is misled by memories
of the _Sicilian Romance_ into weaving a mystery around the fate
of Mrs. Tilney, whom she pictures receiving from the hands of her
husband a nightly supply of coarse food. She watches in vain for
"glimmering lights," like those in the palace of Mazzini, and
determines to search for "a fragmented journal continued to the
last gasp," like that of Adeline's father in _The Romance of the
Forest_. In this search she encounters Tilney, who has returned
unexpectedly from Woodston. He dissipates once and for all her
nervous fancies, and Catherine decides: "Among the Alps and
Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as
were not spotless as an angel, might have the dispositions of a
fiend. But in England it was not so."

Miss Austen's novel is something more than a mock-romance, and
Catherine is not a mere negative of the traditional heroine, but
a human and attractive girl, whose fortunes we follow with