a duenna, to keep off all such from her young
charge. She is for hurrying home at once. Walther resolutely detains
her. "Not till I know all!"--"The church is empty, every one is
gone!" Eva gives as a reason for not being so punctilious. Lene
sees in the very loneliness of the place a reason the more for
departing with all speed,--but Fate again helps Walther. David,
a youthful shoe-maker's apprentice, enters the church from the
vestry, and falls to making mysterious preparations, drawing curtains
which shut off the nave of the church, measuring distances on the
pavement with a yard-rule. No sooner has Magdalene caught sight of
him than she becomes absent-minded, and when Eva urges, "What am
I to tell him? Do you tell me what I am to say!" more good-humoured
than before, she vouchsafes: "Your lordship, the question you ask of
the damsel is not so easy to answer. As a matter of truth, Evchen
Pogner is betrothed----" "But no one," quickly adds the girl, "has as
yet see the bridegroom!" He gathers from the two that the bridegroom
shall be the victor on the following day in a song-contest, the
master-singer to whom the other master-singers award the prize,
and whom the bride herself crowns. It all falls strangely on the
ears of one not a Nuremberger. "The master-singer?..." he falters.
"Are you not one?" Eva asks incredulously, wistfully. And when in his
effort to grasp the situation exactly he continues asking questions,
she answers his interrogative: "The bride then chooses?..." with
complete forgetfulness of every maidenly convention, by an ardent,
honest "You, or no one!"--"Are you gone mad?" Magdalene grasps her
arm, shocked and flustered. She has, and feels no shame. "Good
Lene, help me to win him!"--"But you saw him yesterday for the first
time!" No, she became a victim so readily to love's torment, Eva
tells Lene, because she had long known him in a picture, Albrecht
Duerer's painting of David, after the slaying of Goliath, his sword
at his belt, his sling in his hand, his head brightly encircled
with fair curls.

Joyful agitation has seized the Knight at Eva's sweet impulsive
word, and, with it, bewilderment as to what must be his course in
circumstances so unprecedented. He restlessly paces the pavement,
trying to determine how he shall deal with the strange conditions
raising their barrier between him and the object of his desire.
Magdalene calls to her the object of hers. The middle-aged spinster
has a weak sp