"I know what you want?" repeated Pam, falling back a little dismayed before the directness of his charge, and the black inability of her mind to meet it.
"... You," he said.
"Me?" said Pam again, more vacantly still, taking the word from him, and trying it in turn, like a key, upon all those sayings that had gone before, to see which of their several senses it might fit and open. Then, all of a sudden she saw the door it opened, and the threshold it led over, and let the key fall, as it were, from her hands, and covered her face hotly with her ten small fingers. "Oh, no, no, no!" she panted. "You don't mean that."
She opened a place in her fingers to look at him through, in the silence that followed, like a fawn staring startled from out the high stalks of a thicket, and let both hands slip downward to her skirts with the limp fall of bewilderment. To think this was the secret of his disfavor; this the reason for all his anger, and all her self-interrogations. That he loved her.
He laid down his candle on the dresser beside her own, and ran the finger of his left hand looseningly round the inner rim of his collar, as though it had suddenly grown tight about him.
"Why not that?" he said, in a voice so low and natureless and hoarse that it might have issued from a man of straw, for all the tone it gave.
"Because ... oh ... because of everything," Pam told him, with troubled eyes and lips and fingers. "I never expected it. It 's all so sudden."
"Sudden," he said.
Pam moved her lips in mournful affirmation. It cut her to the quick to hurt him.
"I 'm afraid so," she said, laying the words soothingly over the raw in his soul. "... Terribly sudden."