ith which, grateful, I drink to our peace!" It is
an answer, this enigmatic pledge, to her wistful question: "What
have you to say to me?" He cannot pass into silence, and leave her
forever with her unmingled contempt for him. By broken intimations
he flashes light upon the thing which his lips are interdicted from
revealing. Charged with emotion, the words chime slowly: "Tristan's
honour,--highest truth!... Tristan's misery,--cruellest spite!...
Lure of the heart!... Dream-intuitions!... Sole comforter of an
eternal woe, merciful draught of forgetfulness, unwaveringly I
drink!" He sets the cup to his lips and is drinking as he said,
when with the cry: "Defrauded here too! Mine, one half!" Isolde
wrests the goblet from him: "Traitor, I drink to you!" and drains
it, unwavering as he.

The empty cup drops from her hand. They stand in suspense, gazing
at each other, as defiantly they await death. The searching potion
in a moment begins to take effect; each sees in the eyes of the other
a new thing dawning, strange and beautiful; a trembling seizes upon
their limbs. They press their hands convulsively to their hearts,
the seat of an incomprehensible trouble, then to their foreheads,
within which the brain seems to have become subject to over-wild
delusions. Their eyes meet again, and are averted in a confused
terror; but, invincibly allured, again seek the other--and both
gaze with increasing, at last unconquerable, yearning. With tremulous
lips she speaks his name,--a complete confession in the one word
so spoken. Passionately he calls hers,--confession for confession.
She sinks overpowered on his breast. He clasps her ardently to
him. Brangaene wrings her hands at sight of them locked in their
long, mute embrace. Her work this, the work of her disobedient
hands which, too weak for the stern task assigned them, poured out
the love-potion in place of the death-draught. "Woe, woe," she
wails, "eternal, irredeemable woe, instead of brief death! Behold
the pernicious work of a foolish fondness blossoming heavenward
in lamentation!"

The two move apart for a moment in order better to gaze at each
other. "What was I dreaming," he falters, "of Tristan's honour?"
"What was I dreaming," she wonderingly asks, "of indignities to
Isolde?"--"You, lost to me?" Could man have imagined so wild a
thing! "You repulsing me?" Probable, it seems, as he stretches
to her those yearning arms! It has all been a malignant trick,
then, of evil s