st see Sigmund and
Siglinda clasping in an eternal unseverable embrace, as she had seen
them from the wings of the opera, where she would be waiting as a
Valkyrie to step out and set an audience wild with her mighty
"_Hojotoho!"_

She was feeling the same loneliness and yearning that Sigmund felt in
Hunding's hovel. Without a family, without a home, wandering over the
world, she longed for someone to lean on, someone to clasp tenderly to
her heart! And it was she who unconsciously, instinctively, had drawn
closer to Rafael, and placed her hand in his.

She was ill. She sighed softly with the appealing entreaty of a child,
as if the intense poetry of that memory of music had shattered the frail
remnant of will that had kept her mistress of herself.

"I don't know what's the matter with me to-night. I feel as though I
were dying.... But such a sweet death! So sweet!... What madness,
Rafael! How rash it was of us to have seen each other on such a
night!..."

And with supplicating eyes, as if entreating forgiveness, she gazed out
into the majestic moonlight, where the silence seemed to be stirring
with the palpitation of a new life. She could divine that something was
dying within her, that her will lay prostrate on the ground, without
strength to defend itself.

Rafael, too, was overwhelmed. He held her clasped against his breast,
one of her hands in his. She was weak, languid, will-less, incapable of
resistance; yet he did not feel the brutal passion of the previous
meeting; he did not dare to move. A sense of infinite tenderness came
over him. All he yearned for was to sit there hour after hour in contact
with that beautiful form, clasping her tightly to him, making her one
with him, as a jewel-case might guard a jewel.

He whispered mysteriously into her ear, hardly knowing what he was
saying; tender words that seemed to be coming from someone within him,
thrilling him with a tingling, suffocating passion as they left his
lips.

Yes, it was true; that night was the night dreamed of by the immortal
Poet; the wedding night of smiling Youth and of martial May in his armor
of flowers. The fields were quivering voluptuously under the rays of the
moon; and they, two young hearts, feeling the flutter of Love's wings
about their hair, why should they sit unresponsive there, blind to the
beauty of the night, deaf to the infinite caress that was echoing from
all around?

"Leonora! Leonora!" moaned Rafael.

He had sli