The reader need hardly be told that Emily herself regarded the matter in a very different light. She also had her ideas about the delicacy and the aroma of a maiden's love. She had confessed her love very boldly to the man who had asked for it; had made her rich present with a free hand, and had grudged nothing in the making of it. But having given it, she understood it to be fixed as the heavens that she could never give the same gift again. It was herself that she had given, and there was no retracting the offering. She had thought, and had then hoped, and had afterwards hoped more faintly, that the present had been well bestowed;--that in giving it she had disposed of herself well. Now they told her that it was not so, and that she could hardly have disposed of herself worse. She would not believe that; but, let it be as it might, the thing was done. She was his. He had a right in her which she could not withdraw from him. Was not this sort of giving acknowledged by all churches in which the words for "better or for worse" were uttered as part of the marriage vow? Here there had been as yet no church vow, and therefore her duty was still due to her father. But the sort of sacrifice,--so often a sacrifice of the good to the bad,--which the Church not only allowed but required and sanctified, could be as well conveyed by one promise as by another. What is a vow but a promise? and by what process are such vows and promises made fitting between a man and a woman? Is it not by that compelled rendering up of the heart which men call love? She had found that he was dearer to her than everything in the world besides; that to be near him was a luxury to her; that his voice was music to her; that the flame of his eyes was sunlight; that his touch was to her, as had never been the touch of any other human being. She could submit to him, she who never would submit to any one. She could delight to do his bidding, even though it were to bring him his slippers. She had confessed nothing of this, even to herself, till he had spoken to her on the bridge; but then, in a moment, she had known that it was so, and had not coyed the truth with him by a single nay. And now they told her that he was bad. Bad as he was, he had been good enough to win her. 'Twas thus she argued with herself. Who was she that she should claim for herself the right of having a man that was not bad? That other man that had come to her, that Lord Alfred, was, she was told, good at all points; and he had not moved her in the least. His voice had possessed no music for her; and as for fetching his slippers for him,--he was to her one of those men who seem to be created just that they might be civil when wanted and then get out of the way! She had not been able for a moment to bring herself to think of regarding him as her husband. But this man, this bad man! From the moment that he had spoken to her on the bridge, she knew that she was his for ever.