"Look you, Pagolo," said Catherine, in a melancholy tone, which went to Cellini's heart; "I know that when a woman has once yielded she has no right to draw back afterward; but if the man for whom she has been so weak has a generous heart,—when she says to him that she was acting in good faith at the time, because she had lost her reason, but that she was mistaken,—it is that man's duty, believe me, not to take an unfair advantage of her momentary error. Well, Pagolo, I tell you this: I yielded to you, and yet I did not love you; I loved another, and that other Cellini. Despise me you may,—indeed you ought,—but torment me no more, Pagolo."
"Good!" exclaimed Pagolo, "good! you arrange the matter marvellously well, upon my word! After the time you compelled me to wait for the favor with which you now reproach me, you think that I will release you from a definite engagement which you entered into of your own free will? No, no! And when I think that you are doing all this for Benvenuto, for a man who is twice your age or mine, for a man who doesn't love you, for a man who despises you, for a man who treats you as a courtesan!"
"Stop, Pagolo, stop!" cried Scozzone, blushing with shame and jealousy and rage. "Benvenuto doesn't love me any more, that is true; but he did love me once, and he esteems me still."
"Very good! Why doesn't he marry you, as he promised to do?"
"Promised? Never. No, Benvenuto never promised to make me his wife; for if he had promised, he would have done it. I aspired to mount so high as that: the aspiration led me to hope that it might be so; and when the hope had once taken shape in my heart, I could not confine it there, it overflowed, and I boasted of a mere hope as if it were a reality. No, Pagolo, no," continued Catherine, letting her hand fall into the apprentice's with a sad smile,—"no, Benvenuto never promised me aught."
"Then, see how ungrateful you are, Scozzone!" cried Pagolo, seizing her hand, and mistaking what was simply a mark of dejection for a return to him; "you repulse me, who have promised you and offered you all that Benvenuto, by your own admission, never promised or offered you, while I am convinced that if he were standing there—he who betrayed you—you would freely make to him the confession you so bitterly regret having made to me, who love you so dearly."
"Oh if he were here!" cried Scozzone, "if he were here, Pagolo, you would remember that you betrayed him through hatred, while I betrayed him because I loved him, and you would sink into the ground!"
"Why so?" demanded Pagolo, bold as a lion because he believed Benvenuto to be far away; "why so, if you please? Hasn't every man the right to win a woman's love when that woman doesn't belong to another? If he were here, I would say to him: 'You abandoned Catherine,—poor Catherine, who loved you so well. She was in despair at first, until she fell in with a kind-hearted, worthy fellow, who appreciated her at her true worth, who loved her, and who promised her what you would never promise her,—to make her his wife. He has inherited your rights, and that woman belongs to him.' Tell me, Catherine, what reply your Cellini could make to that?"
"None at all," said a stern, manly voice behind the enthusiastic Pagolo,—"absolutely none at all."
At the same instant a powerful hand fell upon his shoulder, nipped his eloquence in the bud, and threw him to the floor, as pale and terrified as he had been boastful and rash a moment before.