though she has done me only wrong!
If ever I have been guilty of any foolish thing in my life, Spring was
at the bottom of it.... It's youth reborn in us--madness paying us its
annual visit.... And I--ever faithful to her, adoring her; waiting in
this out-of-the-way spot almost a year for her to come, to see her once
more in her best clothes, crowned with orange-blossoms like a virgin--a
wicked virgin who pays me back for my devotion with betrayal!... Just
see what I've come to! I am ill--I don't know why--with excess of life,
perhaps. She drives me on I don't know where, but certainly where I
ought not to go.... If it weren't for sheer will-power on my part, I'd
collapse in a heap on this bench here. I'm just like a drunken man
bending every effort to keep his feet and walk straight."

It was true; she was really ill. Her eyes grew more and more tearful;
her body was quivering, shrinking, collapsing, as if life were
overflowing within her and escaping through all her pores.

Again she was silent, for a long time, her eyes gazing vacantly into
space; then, she murmured, as if in answer to a thought of her own.

"No one ever understood as well as He. He knew everything, felt as
nobody ever felt the mysterious hidden workings of Nature; and He sang
of Springtime as a god would sing. Hans used to remark that many a time;
and it's so."

Without turning her head she added, in a dreamy musing voice.

"Rafael, you don't know _Die Walkuere_, do you? You've never heard the
Spring Song?"

He shook his head. And Leonora, with her eyes still gazing moonward, her
head resting back against her arms, which escaped in all their round,
pearly strength from her drooping sleeves, spoke slowly, collecting her
memories, recreating in her mind's eye that Wagnerian scene of such
intense poetry--the glorification and the triumph of Nature and Love.

Hunding's hut, a barbaric dwelling, hung with savage trophies of the
chase, suggesting the brutish existence of man scarcely yet possessed of
the world, in perpetual strife with the elements and with wild animals.
The eternal fugitive, forgotten of his father,--Sigmund by name, though
he calls himself "Despair," wandering years and years through the
forests, harrassed by beasts of prey who take him for one of themselves
in his covering of skins, rests at last at the foot of the giant oak
that sustains the hut; and as he drinks the hidromel in the horn offered
to him by the sweet Siglinda, he