Bruennhilde does not
heed or hear. When, as Gunther leads her toward the Hall, Siegfried
and Gutrune meet them, coming forth from it with strains of
marriage-music and a festal train of ladies, her eyes never moving
from the ground, she does not see them. "Hail, beloved hero! Hail,
dearest sister!" Gunther greets the bridal pair. "Joyfully I behold
at your side, sister, him who has won you. Two happy pairs are
here met--Bruennhilde and Gunther, Gutrune and Siegfried!"

At the name, Bruennhilde looks quickly up.... Her astonished gaze
fastens upon Siegfried's face and dwells intently upon it. Her
action is so marked that Gunther drops her hand; all watch her
in wonder. A murmur runs through the assembly: "What ails her? Is
she out of her mind?" Bruennhilde, still speechless, falls visibly
to trembling. Siegfried becomes at last aware of something out of
the common in the gaze so persistently fixed upon him. He goes
quietly to the woman and asks: "What trouble burdens Bruennhilde's
gaze?" She has hardly power to frame words, make sounds, her emotion
still further intensified by his cool and disengaged address.
"Siegfried, here!... Gutrune!" she painfully brings forth. "Gunther's
gentle sister," he enlightens her, in his major, matter-of-fact
manner, "wedded to me, as you to Gunther!" At this she recovers her
voice to hurl at him startlingly: "I--to Gunther?... A lie!" She
is swooning with the helpless horror of all this monstrous mystery.
Siegfried, who stands nearest, receives her as she totters, near to
falling. As she lies for a moment in the well-known arms, it seems
impossible, beyond everything impossible, that his unimaginable
purpose should not break down, that he should not be forced to
drop this incomprehensible feint of strangeness. But her dying
eyes searching the face close to them discover in it no glimmer
of feeling. Her heart-broken murmur: "Siegfried.... knows me not?"
touches no chord. The hero is for handing her over with all convenient
haste to her proper guardian. "Gunther, your wife is ailing!" As
Gunther comes, he rouses her: "Awake, woman! Here is your husband!"
Because her senses seem clouded and she a moment before rejected
the statement that she was married to Gunther, he singles out for
her with his finger the personage he means. Her eyes, as he makes
this gesture, are caught by the Ring on his hand. Her mind leaps,
inevitably, to the conclusion that Siegfried, who feigns not to
know her, not