Pam ground her little heel into the dust for departure, and threw up her head with a fine show of pitying disdain.
"Some day, George Cringle," she told him in leaving, "you may be sorry when you think of this."
"Ah can't be na sorrier nor ah am to-day, very well," George admitted sadly, "... if ye mean 'No.'"
"I do," said Pam, with emphasis.
"Well, then," George decided, "there 's nowt no more for it. Things 'll 'a to gan on as they are."
Which they did.
Any other girl might have been ruined with all this adulation; all these proposals open and covert; all these craning necks; these obvious eye-corners—but Pam was only sorry, and sheer pity softened her heart till many thought she had merely said "No" in order to encourage a little pressing. And indeed, Pam said "No" so nicely, so lovingly, so tenderly, so sorrowfully, so sympathetically, and with so little real negation about the sound of it, that one woke up ultimately with a shock to realise the word meant what it did. Some even found it difficult to wake up at all.
"What div ye keep sayin' 'Naw' for?" asked Jevons, with a perplexity amounting to irritation, when he had asked her to be the mother of two grown-up daughters and a son, ready-made, and Pam had not seen her way. "Ah s'll be tekkin' ye at yer wod, an' then 'appen ye 'll wish ye 'd thought better on. Noo, let 's know what ye mean, an' gie us a plain answer to a plain question. Will ye 'a me?"
"No..." said Pam again, shaking her head sorrowfully. Not N-O, NO, as it looks here in print—hard, grim, inexorable, forbidding; but her own soft "No," stealing out soothingly between her two lips like the caress of a hand; more as though it were a penitential "Yes" in nun's habit, veiled and hooded—a sort of monosyllabic Sister of Mercy.
"See-ye! There ye are agen," said Jevons, convicting her of it with his finger. "Noo, what am ah to mek on ye?"