self to your brother as his vassal, the haughty one repelled me;
will you exhibit the same arrogance toward me, if I offer myself
as your ally?" She cannot answer, for the confusion of joy which
overwhelms her; signifying by a gesture her unworthiness of this
high honour, with unsteady step she leaves the room. Siegfried,
closely observed by the other two, gazes lingeringly after her,
fast-bewitched. Some sketch of a project for winning her it must
be prompting his next words: "Have you, Gunther, a wife?" "Not
yet have I courted, and hardly shall I rejoice in a wife! I have
set my heart upon one whom no well-advised endeavour can win for
me!" "In what can you fail," speaks Siegfried's brisk assurance, "if
I stand by you?" "Upon a high rock is her throne, a fire surrounds
her abode," Gunther in hopeless tone describes the forbidding
circumstances. "Upon a high rock is her throne, a fire surrounds
her abode,..." Siegfried rapidly says the words after him, which
his lips know so strangely well. "Only he who breaks through the
fire..." "Only he who breaks through the fire,..." Siegfried is
visibly making a tremendous effort to remember, to account for
the something so curiously familiar in the image evoked. "May be
Bruennhilde's suitor...." By this, the cup of forgetfulness has
completely done its work,--the name suggests to him nothing, the
effort itself to remember is forgotten. "But not for me," sighs
Gunther, "to climb the rock; the fire will not die down for me!"
"I fear no fire! I will win the woman for you," Siegfried declares,
"for your man am I, and my valour is yours, if I may obtain Gutrune
for my wife!" Gutrune is promised him. It is Siegfried's heated
brain--for the first time fruitful in stratagem--which throws off
the plan to deceive this strange woman up in the fire-girdled fastness
of whom they tell him, by means of the Tarnhelm, which lends the
wearer any shape he wish to adopt. The future brothers swear
"blood-brotherhood," pledging their truth in wine, into which each
has let trickle a drop of his blood. "If one of the brothers shall
break the bond, if one of the friends shall betray his faithful
ally, let that which in kindness we drink to-day by drops gush
forth in streams, sacred reparation to the friend!" They clasp
hands upon the compact, and Hagen with his sword cleaves in two
the drinking-horn. "Why," it occurs to Siegfried, "did not you,
Hagen, join in the oath?" "My blood would have spoiled the