Seeing that there is no hope that her husband will remove the veil she threatens to leave if he does not lift it once to show his face. He refuses and she leaves him, “pausing at the door to give one long shuddering gaze that seemed to almost penetrate the mystery of the black veil” but goes, leaving Mr. Hooper who, despite his sadness that his wife, whom he seems to have loved, has left him, “smiled to think that only a material emblem had separated him from happiness, though the horrors, which it shadowed forth, must be drawn darkly between the fondest of lovers.”
After this point, the community no longer asks or bothers him about the veil. Many wonder still but he becomes more an object of curiosity and a symbol of eccentricity rather than anything else. Some in the community even jump in front of him and he gives up his walk at night because of it. He is greatly saddened by this reaction and it is even more upsetting when children flee from him and quit what they’re doing when he approaches. “Their instinctive dread caused him to feel more strongly…that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crepe” and he finds that he must avoid mirrors as he can no longer stand the sight of himself. He continues to walk in the shadows and some suspected that he talked with ghosts and fiends.