As she drives with John Thorpe she “meditates by turns on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trapdoors.”  This prepares us for the delightful scene in which Tilney, on the way to the abbey, foretells what Catherine may expect on her arrival.  The hall dimly lighted by the expiring embers of a wood fire, the deserted bedchamber “never used since some cousin or kin had died in it about twenty years before,” the single lamp, the tapestry, the funereal bed, the broken lute, the ponderous chest, the secret door, the vaulted room, the rusty dagger, the cabinet of ebony and gold with its roll of manuscripts, prove his intimacy with The Romance of the Forest, as well as with The Mysteries of Udolpho.  The black 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.”