Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting situation; provocative, too, of the utmost curiosity?  A fugitive from justice, in a strange, small, dark, ancient house, is seized, threatened, and presented with a young and lovely female stranger.  In this opening we recognise the hand of a master genius.  There must be an explanation of proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be?  The reader is empoigne in the first page, and eagerly follows the flight of La Motte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar domestic.  After a few days, the party observe, in the recesses of a gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic abbey.  They enter; by the light of a flickering lamp they penetrate “horrible recesses,” discover a room handsomely provided with a trapdoor, and determine to reside in a dwelling so congenial, though, as La Motte judiciously remarks, “not in all respects strictly Gothic.”  After a few days, La Motte finds that somebody is inquiring for him in the nearest town.  He seeks for a hiding-place, and explores the chambers under the trapdoor.  Here he finds, in a large chest—­what do you suppose he finds?  It was a human skeleton!  Yet in this awful vicinity he and his wife, with Adeline (the fair stranger) conceal themselves.  The brave Adeline, when footsteps are heard, and a figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger.  His keen eye presently detects the practicable trapdoor, he raises it, and the cowering La Motte recognises in the dreaded visitor—­his own son, who had sought him out of filial affection.

Already Madame La Motte has become jealous of Adeline, especially as her husband is oddly melancholy, and apt to withdraw into a glade, where he mysteriously disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic sepulchre.  This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is proof of faithlessness on the part of a husband.  As the son, Louis, really falls in love with Adeline, Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and Adeline now composes quantities of poems to Night, to Sunset, to the Nocturnal Gale, and so on.

In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive in a terrific thunderstorm.  One is young, the other is a Marquis.  On seeing this nobleman, “La Motte’s limbs trembled, and a ghastly paleness overspread his countenance.  The Marquis was little less agitated,” and was, at first, decidedly hostile.  La Motte implored forgiveness—­for what?—­and the Marquis (who, in fact, owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not far off) was mollified.  They all became rather friendly, and Adeline asked La Motte about the stories of hauntings, and a murder said to have been, at some time, committed in the Abbey.  La Motte said that the Marquis could have no connection with such fables; still, there was the skeleton.