But, all the same, the story which each had beard in childhood, on stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of consciousness.

In Mary's imagination the ideas and images connected with it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with a living pursuing terror.

But they were present, though in a duller, blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks passed on, and the days lengthened toward midsummer, a sort of brooding horror seemed to settle on the house.
Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a hot cinder.

But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad, strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state, she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of frame.
A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of consumption, had rather assumed the color of the events from which the disease itself had started.

Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots as these was naturally a madness of despair.