that thou let that which thou hast already done suffice thee to avenge the wrong I did thee, and bring me my clothes, that I may be able to get me down from here, and spare to take from me that which, however thou mightst hereafter wish, thou couldst not restore to me, to wit, my honour; whereas, if I deprived thee of that one night with me, ’tis in my power to give thee many another night in recompense thereof, and thou hast but to choose thine own times.  Let this, then, suffice, and like a worthy gentleman be satisfied to have taken thy revenge, and to have let me know it:  put not forth thy might against a woman:  ’tis no glory to the eagle to have vanquished a dove; wherefore for God’s and thine own honour’s sake have mercy on me.”

The scholar, albeit his haughty spirit still brooded on her evil entreatment of him, yet saw her not weep and supplicate without a certain compunction mingling with his exultation; but vengeance he had desired above all things, to have wreaked it was indeed sweet, and albeit his humanity prompted him to have compassion on the hapless woman, yet it availed not to subdue the fierceness of his resentment; wherefore thus he made answer:—­“Madam Elena, had my prayers (albeit art I had none to mingle with them tears and honeyed words as thou dost with thine) inclined thee that night, when I stood perishing with cold amid the snow that filled thy courtyard, to accord me the very least shelter, ’twere but a light matter for me to hearken now to thine; but, if thou art now so much more careful of thy honour than thou wast wont to be, and it irks thee to tarry there naked, address thy prayers to him in whose arms it irked thee not naked to pass that night thou mindest thee of, albeit thou wist that I with hasty foot was beating time upon the snow in thy courtyard to the accompaniment of chattering teeth:  ’tis he that thou shouldst call to succour thee, to fetch thy clothes, to adjust the ladder for thy descent; ’tis he in whom thou shouldst labour to inspire this tenderness thou now shewest for thy honour, that honour which for his sake thou hast not scrupled to jeopardize both now and on a thousand other occasions.  Why, then, call’st thou not him to come to thy succour?  To whom pertains it rather than to him?  Thou art his.  And of whom will he have a care, whom will he succour, if not thee?  Thou askedst him that night, when thou wast wantoning with him, whether seemed to him the greater, my folly or the love thou didst bear him:  call him now, foolish woman, and see if the love thou bearest him, and thy wit and his, may avail to deliver thee from my folly.  ’Tis now no longer in thy power to shew me courtesy of that which I no more desire, nor yet to refuse it, did I desire it.  Reserve thy nights for thy lover, if so be thou go hence alive.  Be they all thine and his.  One of them was more than I cared for; ’tis enough for me to have been flouted once.  Ay, and by thy cunning of speech thou strivest might