safe. Full many a time
have I troubled you to dry my tears. I ask you now of your kindness
to cool my cheek aglow with love!" Ortrud has kept basilisk eyes
fixed upon the sweet love-flushed face touched with moonlight.
"She shall curse the hour," speaks the bitter enemy in her teeth,
"in which my eyes beheld her thus!" She bids Telramund under-breath
leave her for a little while. "Wherefore?" he asks. "She falls to
my share," comes grimly from the wife; "take her hero for yours!"
Telramund slips obediently away into the black shadow.

Ortrud watches Elsa for a time breathing her innocent fancies to
the wind; then abruptly cuts short the pastime, calling her name
in a loud, deliberately-plaintive tone. Elsa peers anxiously down
in the dark court. "Who calls me? How lamentably did my name come
shuddering through the night!"--"Elsa, is my voice so strange to
you? Is it your mind to disclaim all acquaintance with the wretch
whom you have driven forth to exile and misery?"--"Ortrud, is it
you? What are you doing here, unhappy woman?"--"Unhappy woman?..."
Ortrud repeats after her, giving the turn of scorn to the young
girl's pitying intonation; "Ample reason have you indeed to call me
so!" With dark artfulness she rouses in Elsa more than proportionate
compassion for her plight, by casting upon the tender-conscienced
creature the whole blame for it. In no scene does the youthfulness
of Telramund's ward appear more pathetically than in this. "In the
solitary forest, where I lived quiet and at peace, what had I done
to you," Ortrud upbraids, "what had I done to you? Living there
joylessly, my days solely spent in mourning over the misfortunes
that had long pursued my house, what had I done to you,--what had I
done to you?"--"Of what, in God's name, do you accuse me?" asks Elsa,
bewildered. Ortrud pursues in her chosen line of incrimination at all
cost: "However could you envy me the fortune of being chosen for wife
by the man whom you had of your free will disdained?"--"All-merciful
God," exclaims Elsa, "What is the meaning of this?"--"And if, blinded
by an unhappy delusion, he attributed guilt to you, guiltless, his
heart is now torn with remorse; grim indeed has his punishment
been. Oh, you are happy! After brief period of suffering, mitigated
by conscious innocence, you see all life smiling unclouded before
you. You can part from me well-pleased, and send me forth on my
way to death, that the dull shadow of my grief may no