Vashti had the imaginative streak of her race, and life in the lonely cottage with this masked personality took on the quality of nightmare. She felt his one eye watching her continually, and was tormented by the thought, "How much does he know?" Who could tell? Had he seen anything from the outhouse window when she had rashly let Willie come so near, or did he know who it was who had fetched the doctor? Sometimes a meaning word seemed to show that he knew everything, sometimes she argued that he could only guess. The black mask filled the whole of her life, the thought of it was never out of her mind, not even when she was working on her old farm, for she had to be breadwinner now. She found herself dwelling on what lay behind the mask, wondering whether it could be as bad as that black expanse, and once she woke herself at night, screaming: "Tear 'en down, Willie! Tear the black mask down!" and then lay trembling, wondering whether her husband had heard. For days he said nothing and she felt herself safe; then one night he turned to her. "There's no air," he complained. "Can't 'ee take down t' curtains? If 'ee can't do anything else, why--tear 'en down, tear 'en down!" He had mimicked her very voice, and silent with fear, she took down the curtain, her fingers shaking so that the rings jingled together along the rod. One day, when he was working in the garden, he turned to face the wind. She saw him sideways against the sky, and the black mask, held taut at brow and chin by the strings, was being blown inward. She never forgot the horror of that concave line against the sky. She came to regard the mask with superstitious awe; it seemed James Glasson's character materialized--the outward expression of the inner man. Nervous and cowed to abjectness as she was, she felt near the end of her endurance. The perpetual scheming to meet Willie unknown to her husband--a difficulty now the latter was nearly always about the house-place, and the wearing uncertainty of "How much does he know?" were fraying her nerves. Some two months after the accident the crash came.