ve yourself, Tristan!"

Hard upon his heels come Mark, Melot, and a flock of courtiers
in hunting-attire. They stop in consternation before the lovers,
who have seen nothing, heard nothing, and stand quietly lost in
each other's embrace. It is only when Brangaene seizes her that
Isolde becomes aware of the spectators. With a natural impulse of
womanly shame she averts her face from all those eyes and hides
it against the flowery bank. Tristan with one arm holds his mantle
wide outspread so that it screens her from sight, and for long
moments continues so, motionless, gazing rigidly at the motionless
men who return his gaze in silence. In the pale first glimmer of
dawn, he might well think them unreal, creations of a bad dream.
The spell of silence is broken by the cry bursting from his lips:
"The desolate Day--for the last time!" Melot steps forward and
points at him: "You shall now tell me," he speaks to Mark, "whether
I rightfully accused him? Whether I am to retain my head which I
placed at stake? I have shown him to you in the very act. I have
faithfully preserved your name and honour from stain."

The King is deeply shaken. No anger is in his unsteady voice, but
utter sorrow. Something deeper has been reached than his pride in
his honour, and that is not his love for Isolde, but his faith
in Tristan. "Have you really?" he bitterly takes up Melot's last
assurance and his boast of fidelity. "Do you imagine it? Behold
him there, the most loyal among the loyal! Look upon him, the
friendliest of friends! The most generous act of his devotion he
has used to stab my heart with deadliest perfidy. If Tristan then
has betrayed me, am I to hope that my honour, which his treason
has struck at, has been loyally defended by Melot?"

These are strange words for Tristan the knight to hear. Applied
to himself, such words as perfidy, treason.... He brushes his arm
wildly across his eyes: "Phantoms of the Day! Morning-dreams! empty
and lying,--vanish, disperse!" The heart-broken King, with a gentleness
more effectual in punishing than the angriest objurgations, goes on
to sear the false friend's conscience by holding up before him,
simply, what he has done; comparing the image of him as he has in
fact proved with the image of him which Mark had cherished. The
reproach is intolerable in view of what Mark himself is: noble,
gentle, great-hearted, and toward Tristan so full of affection!
"To me--this? This, Tristan, to me? Where now