"Ascanio, Ascanio!" cried Colombe, hiding her face against the young man's shoulder; "my father also turns against me. Oh, simply to repeat it kills me with shame! Where can I fly for shelter? Where but to your arms, Ascanio? Yes, it is for you to save me now. Have you spoken to your master, to Benvenuto, who is so strong and great and kindly, judging by your description of him, and whom I love because you love him?" "Nay, do not love him, do not love him, Colombe!" cried Ascanio. "Why not?" whispered the girl. "Because he loves you, because, instead of the friend upon whom we thought we could rely, he is one enemy the more we have to contend against: an enemy, you understand, and the most formidable of all our enemies. Listen." Thereupon he told her how, as he was on the point of making a confidant of Benvenuto, the goldsmith described to him his ideal love, and added that the favorite sculptor of François I. by virtue of the king's word of honor to which he had never proved false, could obtain whatever he chose to ask after the statue of Jupiter was cast. As we know, the boon that Benvenuto proposed to ask was Colombe's hand. "O God! we have none to look to for succor but thee," said Colombe, raising her white hands and her lovely eyes to heaven. "All our friends are changed to enemies, every haven of refuge becomes a dangerous reef. Are you certain that we are so utterly abandoned?" "Only too certain," replied Ascanio. "My master is as dangerous to us as your father, Colombe. Yes," he continued, wringing his hands, "I am almost driven to hate him, Benvenuto, my friend, my master, my protector, my father, my God! And yet I ask you, Colombe, why I should hear him ill will? Because he has fallen under the spell to which every exalted mind that comes in contact with yours must yield; because he loves you as I love you. His crime is my own, after all. But you love me, Colombe, and so I am absolved. What shall we do? For two days I have been asking myself the question, and I do not know whether I begin to detest him, or whether I love him still. He loves you, it is true; but he has loved me so dearly, too, that my poor heart wavers and trembles in its perplexity like a reed shaken in the wind. What will he do? First of all, I shall tell him of Comte d'Orbec's designs, and I hope that he will deliver us from them. But after that, when we find ourselves face to face as enemies, when I tell him that his pupil is his rival, Colombe, his will, which is omnipotent as fate, will perhaps be as blind; he will forget Ascanio to think only of Colombe; he will turn his eyes away from the man he once loved, to see only the woman he loves, for I feel myself that between him and you I should not hesitate. I feel that I would remorselessly sacrifice my heart's past for its future, earth for heaven! And why should he act differently? he is a man, and to renounce his love would be more than human. We must therefore, fight it