of your lie!"--"Who
lied?" she asks coolly. "You!" he unceremoniously flings at her;
"Has not God because of it, through his judgment, brought me to
shame?"--"God?..." She utters the word with such vigour of derision
that he involuntarily starts back. "Horrible!" he shudders after a
moment; "How dreadful does that name sound upon your lips!"--"Ha!
Do you call your own cowardice God?" He raises against her his
maddened hand: "Ortrud!..."--"Do you threaten me? Threaten a woman?"
she sneers, unmoved; "Oh, lily-livered! Had you been equally bold
in threatening him who now sends us forth to our miserable doom,
full easily might you have earned victory in place of shame. Ha!
He who should manfully stand up to the encounter with him would
find him weaker than a child!"--"The weaker he," Telramund observes,
ill-pleased, "the more mightily was exhibited the strength of
God!"--"The strength of God!... Ha, ha!" laughs loud Ortrud, with
the same unmoderated effect of scorn and defiance, which sends her
husband staggering back it step, gasping. "Give me the opportunity,"
she proceeds, with a return to that uncanny quiet of hers, "and I
will show you, infallibly, what a feeble god it is protects him!"

Telramund is impressed. She is telling him after all that which he
would like to believe. Still, the impression of the day's events is
strong upon him,--his overthrow at God's own hand. After that, how
dare he trust her? And yet-- But then again-- "You wild seeress," he
exclaims, torn with doubt, "what are you trying, with your mysterious
hints, to entangle my soul afresh?" She points at the Palace, from
the windows of which the lights have disappeared. "The revellers
have laid them down to their luxurious repose. Sit here beside
me! The hour is come when my seer's eye shall read the invisible
for you." Telramund draws nearer, fascinated, reconquered to her by
this suggestion of some dim hope rearising upon his blighted life.
He sits down beside her and holds close his ear for her guarded
tones. "Do you know who this hero is whom a swan brought to the
shore?"--"No!"--"What would you give to know? If I should tell you
that were he forced to reveal his name and kind there would be an
end to the power which laboriously he borrows from sorcery?"--"Ha!
I understand then his prohibition!"--"Now listen! No one here has
power to wring from him his secret, save she alone whom he forbade
so stringently ever to put to him the question!"--"The t