"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. It was a strange picture: Pagolo on his knees, bent double, with colorless cheeks, and deadly terror depicted on his features; Scozzone, half risen from her chair, motionless and dumfounded, like a statue of Astonishment; and lastly, Benvenuto standing with folded arms, a sword in its sheath in one hand, a naked sword in the other, with an expression in which irony and menace struggled for the mastery. There was a moment of awful silence, Pagolo and Scozzone being equally abashed beneath the master's frown. "Treachery!" muttered Pagolo, "treachery!" "Yes, treachery on your part, wretch!" retorted Cellini. "You asked to see him, Pagolo," said Scozzone; "here he is." "Yes, here he is," said the apprentice, ashamed to be thus treated before the woman he was so anxious to please; "but he is armed, and I have no weapon."